On Jan 4, 2015 8:04 AM, "Rob Seastrom" <rs@seastrom.com> wrote:
symack <symack@gmail.com> writes:
Hello Everyone,
Have a few FC cards and a switch that I would like to use for backplane related packets (ie, local network). I am totally new to FC and would
like
to know will I need a router to be able to communicate between the nodes? What I plan on doing is connecting the network card to the FC switch.
Thanks in Advance,
Nick.
Classic FC is not "routed" in the sense that you're used to from IP, although there is a component in the control plane of every FC switch called a "router", which is perhaps where the confusion comes from (the other three, FWIW, are address manager, fabric controller, and path selector).
To answer the implied question, yes you can just plug them into the switch (some configuration will almost certainly be required). You can also do a point to point connection between two FC devices ("back to back" as it were). The way we used to do it back in the old days before switches was an arbitrated loop; in fact I still can't think FC without thinking FC-AL.
If you have a tcpip FC driver for your OS (I think Linux and BSD do - not sure about OSX or Windows). And I'm pretty sure you can make your switch look essentially like an ethernet hub but idk you're going to be able to get it to separate domains - node 1 sends to 5 as node 4 sends to 3 will not all send at 8gig or w/e fabric speed is - it's degraded because everyone is seeing each other's WWN and data. All nodes will see all traffic unless you configure a static path - 1 to 5 and 3 to 4 - you could also do an ndmp type config of 1 to 3 but idk how many of these you can have and I'm pretty sure 5 still sees 3's data. Also note that just because you have the hardware don't mean you have the license to use it. In most cases the licenses are pretty easy to hack and you can 'pirate' to make this work (and no one will care since you're an individual). But just pointing out another issue you might see Ps - it's been years since I touched one of these things so I might be mis-remembering some points but FWIW.