Unified ports are ports on the fabric interconnect that can be configured to carry either Ethernet or Fibre Channel traffic. These ports are not reserved. A Cisco UCS domain cannot use these ports until you configure them.

Note	When you configure a port on a fabric interconnect, the administrative state is automatically set to enabled. If the port is connected to another device, this may cause traffic disruption. You can disable the port after configuring it.

Configurable beacon LEDs indicate which unified ports are configured for the selected port mode.

If desired, change the properties for the default flow control policy and admin speed of the uplink Ethernet port.

Appliance ports are only used to connect fabric interconnects to directly attached NFS storage.

Note

When you create a new appliance VLAN, its IEEE VLAN ID is not added to the LAN Cloud. Therefore, appliance ports that are configured with the new VLAN remain down, by default, due to a pinning failure. To bring up these appliance ports, you have to configure a VLAN in the LAN Cloud with the same IEEE VLAN ID.

Cisco UCS Manager supports up to four appliance ports per fabric interconnect.

The FC uplinks balance automatically when FC Port Channels are utilized. To create FC Port Channels, refer to Creating an Uplink Fibre Channel Port Channel.

For the FC uplinks that are not members of the Port Channels (Individual ISLs), load balancing is done according to the FC uplinks balancing algorithm. For a vHBA of a host or service profile to choose an available FC uplink, when FC uplink trunking is disabled, the uplink and vHBA must belong to the same VSAN

This process continues for all the other vHBAs. The algorithm also considers other parameters such as pre-fip/fip adapters and number of flogis. You may not see the least-used component when there are less than six flogis.

After a port configuration or any other uplink state changes, if the traffic passing through the FC uplinks is no longer balanced, you can re-balance the traffic by resetting the vHBA(s) on each adapter and allow the load balancing algorithm to evaluate for the current state of the FC uplinks.

FCoE uplink ports are physical Ethernet interfaces between the fabric interconnects and the upstream Ethernet switch, used for carrying FCoE traffic. With this support the same physical Ethernet port can carry both Ethernet traffic and Fibre Channel traffic.

FCoE uplink ports connect to upstream Ethernet switches using the FCoE protocol for Fibre Channel traffic. This allows both the Fibre Channel traffic and Ethernet traffic to flow on the same physical Ethernet link.

Note	FCoE uplinks and unified uplinks enable the multi-hop FCoE feature, by extending the unified fabric up to the distribution layer switch.

You can configure the same Ethernet port as any of the following:

• FCoE uplink port—As an FCoE uplink port for only Fibre Channel traffic.

• Uplink port—As an Ethernet port for only Ethernet traffic.

• Unified uplink port—As a unified uplink port to carry both Ethernet and Fibre Channel traffic.

When you configure an Ethernet uplink and an FCoE uplink on the same physical Ethernet port, it is called a unified uplink port. You can individually enable or disable either the FCoE or Ethernet interfaces independently.

• Enabling or disabling the FCoE uplink results in the corresponding VFC being enabled or disabled.

• Enabling or disabling an Ethernet uplink results in the corresponding physical port being enabled or disabled.

If you disable an Ethernet uplink, it disables the underlying physical port in a unified uplink. Therefore, even when the FCoE uplink is enabled, the FCoE uplink also goes down. But if you disable an FCoE uplink, only the VFC goes down. If the Ethernet uplink is enabled, it can still function properly in the unified uplink port.

An uplink Ethernet port channel allows you to group several physical uplink Ethernet ports (link aggregation) to create one logical Ethernet link to provide fault-tolerance and high-speed connectivity. In Cisco UCS Manager, you create a port channel first and then add uplink Ethernet ports to the port channel. You can add up to 16 uplink Ethernet ports to a port channel.

Note

Cisco UCS uses Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP), not Port Aggregation Protocol (PAgP), to group the uplink Ethernet ports into a port channel. If the ports on the upstream switch are not configured for LACP, the fabric interconnects treat all ports in an uplink Ethernet port channel as individual ports, and therefore forward packets.

An appliance port channel allows you to group several physical appliance ports to create one logical Ethernet storage link for the purpose of providing fault-tolerance and high-speed connectivity. In Cisco UCS Manager, you create a port channel first and then add appliance ports to the port channel. You can add up to eight appliance ports to a port channel.

If Cisco UCS Manager detects any errors on active NI ports, and if the error-disable feature is enabled, Cisco UCS Manager automatically disables the respective FI port that is connected to the NI port that had errors. When a FI port is error disabled, it is effectively shut down and no traffic is sent or received on that port.

The error-disable function serves two purposes:

• It lets you know which FI port is error-disabled and that the connected NI Port has errors.

• It eliminates the possibility that this port can cause other ports, which are connected to the same Chassis/FEX, to fail. Such a failure can occur when the NI port has errors, which can ultimately cause serious network issues. The error-disable function helps prevent these situations.

A Fibre Channel port channel allows you to group several physical Fibre Channel ports (link aggregation) to create one logical Fibre Channel link to provide fault-tolerance and high-speed connectivity. In Cisco UCS Manager, you create a port channel first and then add Fibre Channel ports to the port channel.

Note	Fibre Channel port channels are not compatible with non-Cisco technology.

You can create up to four Fibre Channel port channels in each Cisco UCS domain with Cisco UCS 6200 and 6300 Series fabric interconnects. Each Fibre Channel port channel can include a maximum of 16 uplink Fibre Channel ports.

You can create up to two Fibre Channel port channels in each Cisco UCS domain with Cisco UCS 6324 fabric interconnects. Each Fibre Channel port channel can include a maximum of four uplink Fibre Channel ports.

Ensure that the Fibre Channel port channel on the upstream NPIV switch is configured with its channel mode as active. If both the member port(s) and peer port(s) do not have the same channel mode configured, the port channel will not come up. When the channel mode is configured as active, the member ports initiate port channel protocol negotiation with the peer port(s) regardless of the channel group mode of the peer port. If the peer port, while configured in a channel group, does not support the port channel protocol, or responds with a nonnegotiable status, it defaults to the On mode behavior. The active port channel mode allows automatic recovery without explicitly enabling and disabling the port channel member ports at either end.

switch(config)# int po114
switch(config-if)# channel mode active

An FCoE port channel allows you to group several physical FCoE ports to create one logical FCoE port channel. At a physical level, the FCoE port channel carries FCoE traffic over an Ethernet port channel. So an FCoE port channel with a set of members is essentially an ethernet port channel with the same members. This Ethernet port channel is used as a physical transport for FCoE traffic.

For each FCoE port channel, Cisco UCS Manager creates a VFC internally and binds it to an Ethernet port channel. FCoE traffic received from the hosts is sent over the VFC the same way as the FCoE traffic is sent over Fibre Channel uplinks.

When you create an Ethernet port channel and an FCoE port channel with the same ID, it is called a unified uplink port channel. When the unified port channel is created, a physical Ethernet port channel and a VFC are created on the fabric interconnect with the specified members. The physical Ethernet port channel is used to carry both Ethernet and FCoE traffic. The VFC binds FCoE traffic to the Ethernet port channel.

The following rules will apply to the member port sets of the unified uplink port channel:

• The Ethernet port channel and FCoE port channel on the same ID, must have the same set of member ports.

• When you add a member port channel to the Ethernet port channel, Cisco UCS Manager adds the same port channel to FCoE port channel as well. Similarly, adding a member to the FCoE port channel adds the member port to the Ethernet port channel.

• When you delete a member port from one of the port channels, Cisco UCS Manager automatically deletes the member port from the other port channel.

If you disable an Ethernet uplink port channel, it disables the underlying physical port channel in a unified uplink port channel. Therefore, even when the FCoE uplink is enabled, the FCoE uplink port channel also goes down. If you disable an FCoE uplink port channel, only the VFC goes down. If the Ethernet uplink port channel is enabled, it can still function properly in the unified uplink port channel.

An adapter port channel groups into one logical link all the physical links going from a Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC) into an I/O.

Adapter port channels are created and managed internally by Cisco UCS Manager when it detects that the correct hardware is present. Adapter port channels cannot be configured manually. Adapter port channels are viewable using the Cisco UCS Manager GUI or the Cisco UCS Manager CLI.

The Internal Fabric Manager provides a single interface where you can configure server ports for a fabric interconnect in a Cisco UCS domain. The Internal Fabric Manager is accessible from the General tab for that fabric interconnect.

Some of the configuration that you can do in the Internal Fabric Manager can also be done in nodes on the Equipment tab, on the LAN tab, or in the LAN Uplinks Manager.