FC IP Services

I'm kicking myself for not getting MDS 9216i Switches instead of 9216a.  Appears that the 9216i variant supports IP services like FCIP and ISCSI on the last two ports.  I still may get an IP SSM module for one of the 9216a's so that I can get comfortable with IP services.  In the meantime, I'll post some notes below for future reference.



Fibre Channel over IP is a tunneling protocol where the transport used is IP not FC. FCIP is used to carry Fibre Channel across a WAN between switches..  From the Cisco SAN guide:

Ports - In FCIP, there are Virtual E ports (VE) and Virtual ISL ports.  Again, from the SAN-OS guide:

iSCSI

I'm pretty familiar with iSCSI so I'm just going to work from a sample configuration from the SAN OS cookbook.  SLB using VRRP seems to be the most likely configuration to see in the CCIE lab.

Conf t
iscsi enable

! configure IP on the Gigabit interfaces (omitted intentionally)

! enable the iscsi interfaces
int iscsi1/1 - 2
no shut

! enable CFS distribute for iSLB
islb distribute

! configure VRRP (same as IOS so omitted)

! configure VRP iSLB load balancing
isld vrrp 50 load-balance

! configure iSLB initiators for all the iSCSI clients
islb initiator name iqn.1991-05.com.microsoft:sjc7-pc-1
  static nWWN system-assign
  VSAN 1000