Cisco UCS 2208XP Fabric Extender
The Cisco UCS 2208XP Fabric Extender has eight 10 Gigabit Ethernet, FCoE-capable, Enhanced Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP ) ports that connect the blade chassis to the fabric interconnect. Each Cisco UCS 2208XP has thirty-two 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports connected through the midplane to each half-width slot in the chassis. Typically configured in pairs for redundancy, two fabric extenders provide up to 160 Gbps of I/O to the chassis.
Cisco UCS 2200 Series Fabric Extenders bring the unified fabric into the blade server enclosure, providing multiple 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections between blade servers and the fabric interconnect, simplifying diagnostics, cabling, and management. It is a second-generation I/O module (IOM) that shares the same form factor with the first-generation Cisco UCS 2100 Series Fabric Extenders IOM and is backward-compatible with the shipping Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis.
The Cisco UCS 2200 Series extends the I/O fabric between the Cisco UCS 6100 and 6200 Series Fabric Interconnects and the Cisco UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis, enabling a lossless and deterministic Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) fabric to connect all blades and chassis together. Since the fabric extender is similar to a distributed line card, it does not perform any switching and is managed as an extension of the fabric interconnects. This approach removes switching from the chassis, reducing overall infrastructure complexity and enabling Cisco UCS to scale to many chassis without multiplying the number of switches needed, reducing TCO and allowing all chassis to be managed as a single, highly available management domain.
Feature |
Benefit |
|---|---|
Management by Cisco UCS Manager |
● Reduces TCO by removing management modules from the chassis, making the chassis stateless
● Provides a single, highly available management domain for all system chassis, reducing administrative tasks
|
Autoconfiguration |
Simplifies operation by automatically synchronizing firmware levels between the fabric extenders and the interconnects |
Unified fabric |
● Decreases TCO by reducing the number of network interface cards (NICs), host bus adapters (HBAs), switches, and cables needed
● Transparently encapsulates Fibre Channel packets into Ethernet
|
Automatic failover |
Increases availability with an active-active data plane |
Scalable bandwidth |
Reduces TCO by optimizing overall system capacity to match actual workload demands |
Environmental monitoring |
Removes the need for chassis management modules |
Lossless fabric |
Provides a reliable, robust foundation for unifying LAN and SAN traffic on a single transport |
Priority flow control (PFC) |
● Simplifies management of multiple traffic flows over a single network link
● Supports different classes of service, allowing both lossless and classic Ethernet on the same fabric
|
Systemwide bandwidth management |
Helps enable consistent and coherent quality-of-service (QoS) management throughout the system |
Cisco Data Center Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX) technology |
● Helps enable a consistent operational model between virtual and physical environments
● Provides the same level of network visibility for virtualized and nonvirtualized environments
● Improves diagnostic and troubleshooting capabilities in a virtual environment
● Simplifies network and security policy enforcement when migrating virtual machines from one host to another
|
SFP ports |
● Increases flexibility with a range of interconnect solutions, including copper Twinax cable for short runs and fiber for long runs
● Consumes less power per port than traditional solutions
● Helps enable cost-effective connections on fabric extenders with Cisco Fabric Extender Transceiver (FET) optics
|
Fabric PortChannel |
● Provides flexibility to bundle fabric ports in a PortChannel |
