Hello Nab, I would like to build a FCOE lab environment. If possible, one target, two initiators with the possibility to use them under Linux and ESX with a software FCOE stack and probably a switch. I don't want to spend 10 000 EURs on a 10Gbit switch and wonder if you can recommend a vendor? I looked at the following card from Intel: http://ark.intel.com/products/58954/Intel-Ethernet-Converged-Network-Adapter-X540-T2 Do you have any experience with the network card and can you recommend it? It seems to be well supported under Linux and also ESX including software FCOE. As I understand it FCOE only works over lossless ethernet. Lossless ethernet has the ability to send pause and unpause frames and does not reorder or loose packets. However in the past lossless ethernet does not seem to be standarized and had a few problems: It only works over a single layer 2 hop, it does not work cross-vendor (e.g. is not standardized), link aggregation does not work because that out of order transmissions would be possible which breaks FCOE, lossy traffic gets paused by lossless traffic and so one. So I wonder what the current state of lossless ethernet is? I saw FCOE in Cisco UCS blades and HP Blades but they always use Internet Connect Bays or Top of the Rack switches to change it in FC and than go to a FC storage. I wonder if it is these days possible to go end-to-end. I noticed that some storage arrays like EMC VNX, HP 3PAR, Hitachi HDS and so on support but I never seen an environment where it was end-to-end not even over a single layer 2 HOP. I would appreciate if you or someone else could shed some light into the lossless ethernet topic. Cheers, Thomas -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe target-devel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
