Fibre Channel Over Ethernet: Broadcom NetXtreme II Network Adapter User Guide
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Fibre Channel Over Ethernet: Broadcom NetXtreme II Network
Adapter User Guide
Overview
FCoE Boot from SAN
Configuring FCoE
Overview
In today's data center, multiple networks, including network attached storage (NAS), management, IPC, and storage, are
used to achieve the desired performance and versatility. In addition to iSCSI for storage solutions, Fibre Channel over
Ethernet (FCoE) can now be used with capable Broadcom C-NICs. FCoE is a standard that allows Fibre Channel protocol to be
transferred over Ethernet by preserving existing Fibre Channel infrastructures and capital investments by classifying received
FCoE and FCoE Initialization Protocol (FIP) frames.
The following FCoE features are supported:
Receiver classification of FCoE and FIP frames. FIP is the FCoE Initialization Protocol used to establish and maintain
connections.
Receiver CRC offload
Transmitter CRC offload
Dedicated queue set for Fibre Channel traffic
Data Center Bridging (DCB) provides lossless behavior with Priority Flow Control (PFC)
DCB allocates a share of link bandwidth to FCoE traffic with Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS)
DCB supports storage, management, computing, and communications fabrics onto a single physical fabric that is simpler to
deploy, upgrade, and maintain than in standard Ethernet networks. DCB technology allows the capable Broadcom C-NICs to
provide lossless data delivery, lower latency, and standards-based bandwidth sharing of data center physical links. The DCB
supports FCoE, iSCSI, Network-Attached Storage (NAS), Management, and IPC traffic flows. For more information on DCB,
see
Using Data Center Bridging (DCB)
.
Supported Operating Systems
Windows
Windows 2008 SP2
Windows 2008 R2
For information on installing, upgrading, and uninstalling the drivers, see
Windows Driver and Application Installation
in this
user guide.
Linux
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 SP1, kernel version 2.6.32.12-0.7-default
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 SP1, kernel version 2.6.32.36-0.5-default
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6, kernel version 2.6.32-71.el6.x86_64
For information on installing, upgrading, and uninstalling the drivers, see
Linux Driver Software
in this user guide.
FCoE Boot from SAN
This section describes the install and boot procedures for the Windows and Linux operating systems. The Windows procedure
is a direct install to LUN. For Linux, the installation procedure is indirect because the drivers are not inbox and therefore not
included in the INITRD image. The following section details the BIOS setup and configuration of the boot environment prior to