Deployment Guide

Other Auto-Congured Settings

After the Aggregator powers on, it auto-congures and is operational with software features enabled, including:

• Ports: Ports are administratively up and auto-congured to operate as hybrid ports to transmit tagged and untagged VLAN trac.For

more information about how ports are numbered, refer to Port Numbering.

• Link aggregation: All uplink ports are congured in a single LAG (LAG 128).

• VLANs: All ports are congured as members of all (4094) VLANs. All VLANs are up and can send or receive layer 2 trac. For more

information, refer to VLAN Membership.

• Data center bridging capability exchange protocol (DCBx): Server-facing ports auto-congure in auto-downstream port roles; uplink

ports auto-congure in auto-upstream port roles.

• Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) connectivity and FCoE initiation protocol (FIP) snooping: The uplink port channel (LAG 128) is

enabled to operate in Fibre channel forwarder (FCF) port mode.

• Link layer discovery protocol (LLDP): Enabled on all ports to advertise management TLV and system name with neighboring devices.

• Internet small computer system interface (iSCSI)optimization.

• Internet group management protocol (IGMP) snooping.

• Jumbo frames: Ports are set to a maximum MTU of 12,000 bytes by default.

• Link tracking: Uplink-state group 1 is automatically congured. In uplink state-group 1, server-facing ports auto-congure as

downstream interfaces; the uplink port-channel (LAG 128) auto-congures as an upstream interface. Server-facing links are auto-

congured to be brought up only if the uplink port-channel is up.

• In VLT mode, port 9 is automatically congured as VLT interconnect ports. VLT domain conguration is automatic. This includes peer-

link, congured MAC, backup link and setting every port channel as VLT port-channel.

Data Center Bridging Support

To eliminate packet loss and provision links with required bandwidth, Data Center Bridging (DCB) enhancements for data center networks

are supported.

The aggregator provides zero-touch conguration for DCB. The aggregator auto-congures DCBX port roles as follows:

• Server-facing ports are congured as auto-downstream interfaces.

• Uplink ports are congured as auto-upstream interfaces.

In operation, DCBx auto-congures uplink ports to match the DCB conguration in the ToR switches to which they connect.

The Aggregator supports DCB only in standalone mode.

FCoE Connectivity and FIP Snooping

Many data centers use Fiber Channel (FC) in storage area networks (SANs). Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) encapsulates Fiber

Channel frames over Ethernet networks.

On an Aggregator, the internal ports support FCoE connectivity and connects to the converged network adapter (CNA) in servers. FCoE

allows Fiber Channel to use 10-Gigabit Ethernet networks while preserving the Fiber Channel protocol.

The Aggregator also provides zero-touch conguration for FCoE connectivity. The Aggregator auto-congures to match the FCoE settings

used in the switches to which it connects through its uplink ports.

FIP snooping is automatically congured on an Aggregator. The auto-congured port channel (LAG 128) operates in FCF port mode.

iSCSI Operation

Support for iSCSI trac is turned on by default when the Aggregator powers up. No conguration is required.

Before You Start