Dell Broadcom NetXtreme Family of Adapters Broadcom NetXtreme II Network Adapt - Page 126

Fibre Channel Over Ethernet: Broadcom NetXtreme II Network Adapter User Guide Back to Contents Page 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 file:///T|/htdocs/NETWORK/BroadCom/71921/NetXtremeII/en/fcoe.htm[9/26/2012 3:29:33 PM]