Fabric Connectivity Options; Static Pinning Fabric Interface Connection - Cisco Nexus B22HP Design And Deployment Manual

Fabric Connectivity Options

The Cisco Nexus B22HP creates a distributed modular chassis with the Cisco Nexus parent switch after a fabric
connection has been made over standard 10-Gbps cabling. This connection can be accomplished using any of the
following types of interconnects:
●
Cisco passive direct-attach cables (1M, 3M, or 5M)
● Cisco active direct-attach cables (7M or 10M)
● Cisco standard Enhanced Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP+) optics (SR or LR)
●
Cisco Fabric Extender Transceivers
After the fabric links have been physically established, the logical configuration of the links needs to be performed.
There are two methods of connection for the fabric links to the Cisco Nexus B22HP:
●

Static pinning fabric interface connection

● PortChannel fabric interface connection
Static Pinning Fabric Interface Connection
Static Pinning is the default method of connection between the fabric extender and the Cisco Nexus parent switch.
In this mode of operation, a deterministic relationship exists between the host interfaces and the upstream parent
with up to eight fabric interfaces. These fabric interfaces are equally divided among the 16 server-side host ports. If
fewer fabric ports are allocated, then more server ports are assigned to a single fabric link. The advantage of this
configuration is that the traffic path and the amount of allocated bandwidth are always known for a particular set of
servers.
Since static pinning will group host-side ports into individual fabric links, you should understand its relationship and
how ports are grouped. The size of the port groups is determined by the number of host ports divided by the
max-link parameter value. Thus, if the max-link parameter is set to 2, then eight host ports would be assigned to
each link. The interfaces will be grouped in ascending order starting from the interface 1. Thus, interfaces 1 to 8 will
be pinned to one fabric link, and interfaces 9 to 16 will be pinned to a different interface (Table 2).
Table 2.
Interface
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8
9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16
Table 3 summarizes the assignment with four fabric links with the max-link parameter set to 4, the interfaces are
divided into four groups.
Table 3.
Interface
1, 2, 3, and 4
5, 6, 7, and 8
9, 10, 11, and 12
13,14,15, and 16
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Interface Assignment with Two Fabric Links
Interface Assignment with Two Fabric Links
Fabric Link
Fabric link 1
Fabric link 2
Fabric Link
Fabric link 1
Fabric link 2
Fabric link 3
Fabric link 4
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