FIBRE CHANNEL TOPOLOGIES,

TERMINOLOGY, AND
ADDRESSING
Joe Orlak
Yan Grober

Revision 001

2016 Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. Company Proprietary Information

Fibre Channel Topologies

Three kinds of Fibre Channel (FC) Topologies:
Point-to-Point (Pt to Pt) Allows two devices to talk
Arbitrated Loop Allows 126 devices to talk, Arbitrated Loop Physical
Address (AL_PA) 00, is reserved for the Fabric Loop Port (FL_Port)
Switched Fabric Supports up to 16 Million devices and is the most
commonly used topology

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Point-to-Point

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Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FCAL)

Theoretically up to 126 devices
on a shared media for small
systems at reduced cost and
reduced performance level

Requires a port to successfully

arbitrate prior to establishing a
circuit to send and/or receive
frames

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Switched Fabric
Switch Fabric Topology:
Highest performance level
High scalability
Good fault isolation
Embedded management
and services
Up to 239 unique domains
(switches) with:
Unique switch names
Unique IP addresses

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Switched Fabric (cont.)

A Fabric is a connection of Fibre Channel switches and/or
devices capable of routing frames using only a destination
identifier (D_ID) A Fabric is commonly pictured as a cloud

Fabric

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Switched Fabric (cont.)

An FC Port is a single physical connection that provides
separate transmit (tx) and receive (rx) functions
Tx encodes and transforms data to serial format
Rx recovers clock from serial data received, decodes and deserializes the data

An FC Node is an FC device that transmits and receives

information via one or more ports
Each Node has a unique 64-bit address called Node World
Wide Name. The format of this 64-bit identifier along with the
format for the port on this nodes 64-bit identifier are specified
by IEEE.

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Switched Fabric (cont.)

Each Port also has a unique 64-bit address called Port World
Wide Name.
N_Ports are node ports that can either attach to other N_Ports
or to Fabric Ports (F_Port).
Nx_Ports could either be N_Ports (x not used) or NL_Ports
(Node Loop Ports) used in the Arbitrated Loop topology.

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Switched Fabric Device Addressing

World Wide Name (WWN) Fixed 64-bit addresses used to uniquely identify
Fabric devices (nodes and ports)
Constant, regardless of the fabric switch to which the device is attached

Fabric Address Unique 24-bit address, needed for devices and services to
communicate, also referred to as
Also called port identifier (PID), Source ID (SID), or Destination IDs (DID)
Can vary, depending on the fabric switch to which the device is attached

Well-Known Addresses The Fabric addresses used for accessing Fabric

services
Fabric Services Intelligent services provided by a Fabric, necessary for
Fabric operation 1

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Device Addressing: FC Node WWN (nWWN)

FC node WWNs (nWWN) follow the format shown above

Applies to switches, storage, and HBAs

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Device Addressing: FC Port WWN (pWWN)

FC port WWNs (pWWN) follow the format shown above

Applies to switches, storage, and HBAs
With NPIV, a physical server Host Bus Adapter (HBA) can provide up to
255 unique pWWN for use by virtual servers

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Device Addressing: nWWN and pWWN

Example

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N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV)

Virtual servers require secure access to storage the same way
as physical servers
Without NPIV, a single physical server connection is unable to
provide independent storage access to individual virtual
servers
Instead, all storage ports and Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs) are
exposed to all virtual machines, reducing security and
manageability

NPIV is an ANSI standard designed to solve this problem

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Device Addressing: NPIV

With NPIV, a physical server Host
Bus Adapter (HBA) can provide up
to 255 unique Port World Wide
Names for use by virtual servers
Fabric switches with NPIV support
can then assign unique fabric IDs to
each virtual server as they log in to
the fabric
With NPIV support, standard fabric
zoning and storage LUN masking
can be used with virtual machines
to isolate storage ports and LUNs to
the appropriate virtual server just
as they are with physical servers

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Device Addressing: FC Addresses

Fabric addresses are 24-bits (3 bytes long)
A devices Fabric address indicates:
The switch and port index to which the device is connected

Fabric addresses are represented in hexadecimal format (0x)

which often appear before the address
Fabric addresses modes include legacy Native, Extended Edge,
and default Core PID used in most products

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Device Addressing: FC Addresses (cont.)

Each switch is a domain and is responsible for assigning
unique addresses to its connected end devices.
In Fabric OS v6.0 and later, all FC addresses follow the Core
PID format 1
Box 1

8 bits each: for the switch Domain ID; Area index; and node
address
Fabric attached devices: DD AA 00 or DD AA 132
Public loop / NPIV: DD AA PP3

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Device Addressing: Example of Shared Area Numbers

for FCx-48 Blades
A shared area is an Area ID that exists more than once on a single chassis or
domain_ID. A shared area is differentiated by its Node Address.
The FC4-48 and FC8-48 blades have some ports that use shared areas that
allow for greater than 256 ports in a single domain 1
Ports 16-47 of these blades use shared areas
Shared Area port identifiers (PIDs) use a Node Address of either 0x00 or 0x80
Example of two shared areas on a FC8-48 blade in slot 1:

018000 Port 16

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018080 Port 40

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Well-Known Addresses of Fabric Services

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FC Data Flow
Fibre Channel uses Exchanges to send Sequences of Frames
The Exchange manages the transaction it contains a set of related sequences

Sequences within the Exchange hold sets of related Fibre Channel frames
A Frame contains a header and payload and is up to 2148 bytes
Below is an example of a Small Computer Serial Interface (SCSI) Read Command:

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FC Data Flow (cont.)

Fibre Channel Information Transfer

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