Fabric OS FCIP Administrator’s Guide 51
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Virtual Fabrics and FCIP
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Virtual Fabrics and FCIP
Any GigE_Port and all of its associated FCIP tunnels on a chassis can be assigned to any Logical
Switch. As with the current Fabric OS, the port types supported by FCIP are either VE_ or VEX_Port.
When a GigE port is moved to a logical switch, all eight VE_ and VEX_Ports are automatically
moved. There is no interaction required to assign or move them.
The following constraints on VE_ and VEX_Ports apply:
• All VEX_Ports will be persistently disabled when Virtual Fabric mode is enabled. You need to
create a logical switch with the base switch attribute turned on and move the ports to the new
base switch.
• The ports must be offline before they are moved from one logical switch to another.
• A logical switch is independent of the base switch. Therefore all GigE_Port based protocol
addresses, such as IP addresses, must be unique within a logical switch.
• FCIP tunnels working as an extended ISL can carry traffic for multiple fabrics. Therefore a
GigE_Port used as an extended ISL must be assigned to the base switch.
TCP Byte Streaming
TCP Byte Streaming allows a Brocade 7500 Extension Switch or an FR4-18i blade to communicate
with supported third party WAN optimization hardware connected on the GigE ports configured for
FCIP. This feature is enabled when configuring the FCIP tunnel.
The TCP Byte Streaming feature supports an FCIP frame that has been split into a maximum of
eight separate TCP segments. If the frame is split into more than eight segments, it results in
prematurely sending a frame to the FCIP layer with an incorrect size and the FCIP tunnel bounces.
Only one tunnel is allowed to be configured for a GigE port that has TCP Byte Streaming configured.
The tunnel cannot have compression enabled; it cannot have FC Fastwrite enabled, and must have
a committed rate set on the tunnel. The committed rate must come from communication with the
supported third party WAN optimizer hardware. This feature requires both sides of the tunnel to be
configured in exactly the same way. Older versions of the software cannot bring up a tunnel that
has a TCP Byte Streaming configured FCIP tunnel.
Supported third party WAN optimizer hardware
The following third party hardware is supported for TCP Byte Streaming:
• Silver Peak
Model – NX7500 and NX8600
Software Version: minimum version 2.1.4.0_20084.
• Riverbed Steelhead optimizer
