Fibre Channel Network

Mon Jan 5 02:36:09 UTC 2015

On Jan 4, 2015 8:04 AM, "Rob Seastrom" <rs at seastrom.com> wrote:
>
>
> symack <symack at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Hello Everyone,
> >
> > Have a few FC cards and a switch that I would like to use for backplane
> > related packets (ie, local network). I am totally new to FC and would
like
> > to know will I need a router to be able to communicate between the
nodes?
> > What I plan on doing is connecting the network card to the FC switch.
> >
> > Thanks in Advance,
> >
> > Nick.
>
> Classic FC is not "routed" in the sense that you're used to from IP,
> although there is a component in the control plane of every FC switch
> called a "router", which is perhaps where the confusion comes from
> (the other three, FWIW, are address manager, fabric controller, and
> path selector).
>
> To answer the implied question, yes you can just plug them into the
> switch (some configuration will almost certainly be required).  You
> can also do a point to point connection between two FC devices ("back
> to back" as it were).  The way we used to do it back in the old days
> before switches was an arbitrated loop; in fact I still can't think FC
> without thinking FC-AL.
>

If you have a tcpip FC driver for your OS (I think Linux and BSD do - not
sure about OSX or Windows). And I'm pretty sure you can make your switch
look essentially like an ethernet hub but idk you're going to be able to
get it to separate domains - node 1 sends to 5 as node 4 sends to 3 will
not all send at 8gig or w/e fabric speed is - it's degraded because
everyone is seeing each other's WWN and data. All nodes will see all
traffic unless you configure a static path -  1 to 5 and 3 to 4 - you could
also do an ndmp type config of 1 to 3 but idk how many of these you can
have and I'm pretty sure 5 still sees 3's data.

Also note that just because you have the hardware don't mean you have the
license to use it. In most cases the licenses are pretty easy to hack and
you can 'pirate' to make this work (and no one will care since you're an
individual). But just pointing out another issue you might see

Ps - it's been years since I touched one of these things so I might be
mis-remembering some points but FWIW.