Cisco Nexus 5000 Series - ARP Processing with vPC; Layer 3 Forwarding to Peer MAC Address

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Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switch CLI Software Configuration Guide

OL-16597-01

Chapter 1 Product Overview

New Technologies in the Cisco Nexus 5000 Series

IEEE 802.3x link-level flow control allows a congested receiver to signal the far end to pause the data

transmission for a short period of time. The pause functionality is applied to all the traffic on the link.

The priority flow control (PFC) feature applies pause functionality to specific classes of traffic on the

Ethernet link. For example, PFC can provide lossless service for the FCoE traffic, and best-effort service

for the standard Ethernet traffic. PFC can provide different levels of service to specific classes of

Ethernet traffic (using IEEE 802.1p traffic classes).

I/O Consolidation

I/O consolidation (IOC) allows a single network technology to carry IP, SAN and IPC traffic.

FCoE enables an evolutionary approach to IOC. The upper Fibre Channel layers are unchanged, so the

Fibre Channel operational model is maintained. FCoE network management and configuration is similar

to a native Fibre Channel network.

Cisco Nexus 5000 Series switches use FCoE to carry Fibre Channel and Ethernet traffic on the same

physical Ethernet connection between the switch and the server. At the server, the connection terminates

to a converged network adapter (CNA) . The adapter presents two interfaces to the server’s operating

system (OS): one Ethernet NIC interface and one Fibre Channel HBA interface. The server OS is not

aware of the FCoE encapsulation (See Figure 1-1)

At the switch, the incoming Ethernet port separates the Ethernet and Fibre Channel traffic (using

Ethertype to differentiate the frames). Ethernet frames and Fibre Channel frames are switched to their

respective network-side interfaces.

Cisco Nexus 5000 Series switches provide quality of service (QoS) capabilities to ensure lossless service

across the switch for Fibre Channel traffic. Best-effort service can be applied to all of the Ethernet traffic

or specific classes of Ethernet traffic can be configured with different QoS levels.

Figure 1-1 I/O Consolidation

FCoE

Adapter

10GE

NIC

HBA

IP FC SAN

10GE

IOC Switch

Server

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