Cisco UCS 2304 Fabric Extender

The Cisco UCS 2304 Fabric Extender has four 40 Gigabit Ethernet FCoE-capable Quad Small Form-Factor Pluggable (QSFP+) ports that connect the blade chassis to the fabric interconnect. Each Cisco UCS 2304 can provide one 40 Gigabit Ethernet ports connected through the midplane to each half-width slot in the chassis giving it a total eight 40G interfaces to the compute. Typically configured in pairs for redundancy two fabric extenders provide up to 320 Gbps of I/O to the chassis.

Performance

• Hardware forwarding at 960 Gbps
• Low-latency cut-through design providing predictable consistent traffic latency regardless of packet size traffic pattern or enabled features

Layer 2

• Layer 2 VLAN trunks
• IEEE 802.1Q VLAN encapsulation
• Support for up to 1024 VLANs and Virtual SANs (VSANs)
• Support for Data Center VM-FEX architecture
• Jumbo frames on all ports (up to 9216 bytes)
• Pause frames (IEEE 802.3x)

QoS

• Layer 2 IEEE 802.1p (Class of Service [CoS])
• CoS-based egress queuing
• Egress strict-priority queuing
• Egress port-based scheduling: Weighted Round-Robin (WRR)
• Eight hardware queues per port

High availability

• Up to two fabric extenders can work in the Cisco UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis
• Active-active data-plane operation with failover
• Capability to fail over from one fabric extender to another in the event of a failure
• Active-passive management-plane operation
• Support for nonstop management-plane functions; if the active fabric extender fails the passive fabric extender takes over the chassis management functions

Management

• Management of fabric extenders integrated into Cisco UCS Manager
• Capability to manage blade server chassis components such as power supplies fans and blades in conjunction with the fabric interconnect
• Firmware levels between the fabric extender and fabric interconnect always synchronized

Low-Latency Lossless 40 Gigabit Ethernet Unified Network Fabric

• PFC (per-priority pause frame support)
• Data Center Bridging Exchange (DCBX) Protocol
• IEEE 802.1Qaz: Bandwidth management

Industry standards

• IEEE 802.1p: CoS prioritization
• IEEE 802.1Q: VLAN tagging
• IEEE 802.3: Ethernet
• IEEE 802.3ad: Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP)
• IEEE 802.3ba: 40 Gigabit Ethernet
• QSFP+ support