HP 6120XG HP ProCurve Series 6120 Blade Switches Advanced Traffic Management G - Page 275

Note Converged Enhanced Ethernet on the HP ProCurve 6120XG Switch FIP Snooping FIP Snooping With the introduction of CEE support on ProCurve switches, end nodes connected to ProCurve switches can communicate storage traffic with Fibre Channel fabric(s) using the Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocol. Beginning with release z.14.34, eight FC-MAPs are supported. There is no requirement to configure a MAC address on an FCF Port. If you are using earlier versions of z.14.xx software, you should refer to previous versions of the documentation for information on your software version. In a conventional Fibre Channel fabric, all end nodes are directly connected to a Fibre Channel switch through point-to-point links. The Fibre Channel switch has complete control over which node is permitted to communicate with the fabric and the address the node uses to communicate, thus ensuring a degree of robustness of the FC fabric. In an FCoE configuration, end nodes are not directly physically connected to the FC switches; therefore, the FC fabric cannot rely on physical connectivity to meet the same degree of robustness as a conventional FC fabric. FIP (FCoE Initialization Protocol) Snooping is available. The FC standard recommends intermediate CEE switches implement a packet snooping and ACL-based method to ensure only authenticated end nodes are permitted to communicate. The end nodes use only the FC switch assigned address for such communication. This method is referred to as FIP Snooping and is specified in Annex C of the FC-BB-5 Specification at www.t11.org/ftp/t11/pub/fc/bb-5/09-056v5.pdf. Figure 6-1 represents a FIP Snooping implementation. 6-21