Information About Virtual Fibre Channel (VFC) Interfaces
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) allows Fibre Channel and Ethernet traffic to be carried on the same physical Ethernet connection between the switch and the servers.
The Fibre Channel portion of FCoE is configured as a virtual Fibre Channel interface. Logical Fibre Channel features (such as interface mode) can be configured on virtual Fibre Channel interfaces.
A virtual Fibre Channel (vfc) interface must be bound to an interface before it can be used. The binding is to a physical Ethernet interface when the converged network adapter (CNA) is directly connected to the switch or port channel when the CNA connects to the Fibre Channel Forwarder (FCF) over a virtual port channel (vPC).
VF Port
A virtual fabric (VF) port in an FCoE network acts as a fabric port that connects to a peripheral device (host or disk) operating as an N port. A VF port can be attached to only one N port.
VE Port
A virtual expansion (VE) port acts as an expansion port in an FCoE network. VE ports can connect multiple FCoE switches together in the network. You can bind a VE port to a physical ethernet port or a port channel.
Traffic is load balanced across equal cost E_Ports and VE_Ports based on SID, DID, and OXID. Traffic across members of a port channel that a VE_Port is bound to is load balanced based on SID, DID, and OXID.
VNP Ports
Connectivity from an FCoE NPV bridge to the FCF is supported only over point-to-point links. These links can be individual Ethernet interfaces or port channel interfaces. For each FCF connected to an Ethernet/port-channel interface, a vFC interface must be created and bound to it. These vFC interfaces must be configured as VNP ports.
On the VNP port, the FCoE NPV bridge emulates an FCoE-capable host with multiple FCoE nodes (ENodes), each with a unique ENodes MAC address. By default, the VNP port is enabled in trunk mode.
Multiple VSANs can be configured on the VNP port. The FCoE VLANs that correspond to the VNP port VSANs must be configured on the bound Ethernet interface.