Discovery for fibre channel over ethernet devices

摘要

Techniques are provided for performing discovery in a Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) network. An FCoE Node (ENode) discovers the FCoE Forwarders (FCFs) connected to its network segment by transmitting a solicitation message to the multicast MAC address “All-FCF-MACs”. All FCFs receive packets with this multicast MAC address including the solicitation message that announces the presence of the ENode. Each FCF replies with a unicast advertisement message that provides the ENode with a MAC address of the responding FCF. The ENode builds a list of the FCFs available on its network segment and may then establish a virtual link with one or more of the FCFs through a Fabric Login (FLOGI) exchange.

主权项

1. A method, comprising:
by a node of a Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) network:
transmitting an FCoE solicitation message to a plurality of FCoE Forwarders (FCFs) using a multicast destination address, the plurality of FCFs being connected over a network segment associated with the node;receiving a unicast FCoE advertisement message from each of the plurality of FCFs in response to the solicitation message, each advertisement message including an address of a corresponding one of the plurality of FCFs;maintaining, for each of a plurality of ports of the node, FCF-MAC address information associated with FCFs reachable through the respective port, the FCF-MAC addresses information being obtained from the advertisement messages received from the plurality of FCFs, wherein the address information is maintained for use in subsequent communications with at least some of the plurality of FCFs; and performing a FLOGI process with a subset of the plurality of FCFs, wherein the FLOGI process is performed using the address information.