Cisco Fabric Extender Technology - Cisco WS-C4900M Manual

Cisco Fabric Extender Technology

Cisco Unified Fabric provides the foundational connectivity and
unifies storage, data networking and network services delivering
architectural flexibility and consistent networking across physical,
virtual and cloud environment, enabling convergence, network scale,
virtualization awareness, and intelligence through the industry-
leading Cisco NX-OS.
As a key component to Cisco Unified Fabric, Cisco Fabric Extender
(FEX) Technology comprises of technologies that enable fabric
extensibility with simplified management enabling the switching
access layer to extend and expand all the way to the server
hypervisor as the customer's business grows.
Based on the emerging standard IEEE 802. 1 BR, Cisco FEX
Technology solution comprises of a parent switch that can be a Cisco
Nexus 5000 Series Switch, Nexus 7000 Series Switch or a Cisco
UCS Fabric Interconnect. The parent switch is then extended to
connect to the server either as a remote line card with Nexus 2000
Series Fabric Extenders or logically partition or virtualize adapter
ports to connect to any type of servers—rack and/or blades, with
Cisco Adapter FEX and VM-FEX technologies.
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