Users Guide

8–VMware Driver Software
FCoE Support
66 BC0054508-00 J
FCoE Support
This section describes the contents and procedures associated with installation of
the VMware software package for supporting QLogic FCoE C-NICs.
Drivers
QLogic BCM57xx and BCM57xxx FCoE drivers include the bnx2x and the bnx2fc.
 The bnx2x driver manages all PCI device resources (registers, host
interface queues, and so on.) and also acts as the Layer 2 VMware low-level
network driver for QLogic's BCM57xx and BCM57xxx 10G device. This
driver directly controls the hardware and is responsible for sending and
receiving Ethernet packets on behalf of the VMware host networking stack.
The bnx2x driver also receives and processes device interrupts, both on
behalf of itself (for Layer 2 networking) and on behalf of the bnx2fc (FCoE
protocol) and C-NIC drivers.
 The bnx2fc QLogic VMware FCoE driver is a kernel mode driver used to
provide a translation layer between the VMware SCSI stack and the QLogic
FCoE firmware and hardware. In addition, the driver interfaces with the
networking layer to transmit and receive encapsulated FCoE frames on
behalf of the Open-FCoE libfc and libfcoe for FIP and device discovery.
Supported Distributions
The FCoE and DCB feature set is supported on VMware ESXi 6.0 and later.
Enabling FCoE
To enable FCoE hardware offload on the C-NIC:
1. Determine the ports that are FCoE-capable by issuing the following
command:
# esxcli fcoe nic list
Output example:
vmnic4
User Priority: 3
Source MAC: FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF
Active: false
Priority Settable: false
Source MAC Settable: false
VLAN Range Settable: false
VN2VN Mode Enabled: false