You actually don't need to pass an HBA through. Most FC HBAs and switches nowadays support NPIV (N-Port ID Virtualization) which in conjunction with VMware, allows you to have a virtual FC HBA that has its own WWPN that you can zone in like a hardware host. This has the added benefit of being able to use a LUN directly in a VM without having to either use RDM or (even worse) a VMDK.That part does make it interesting - that switch has everything you need to attach native FC storage arrays to servers with 10GbE CNA's with FCoE.
Makes me think you could do some rather odd all-in-one type configs with it. Pass through a FC HBA to a NAS VM along with its drives and have the VM be a FC target, then consume that storage using FCoE from the host(s).
Gigabit SFP's will work in a 10GbE SFP+ port, so long as the switch marks the ports as 100/1000/10000. With the Cisco Nexus 3k switches I work with, you can even use non-cisco SFP's, but you need to manually set the speed on the port to get the SFP to detect properly.Is the 1G SFP can work in the SFP+ ports in the switch MP8000? I think it will work in theory but still need to practice.
The FC ports are for FC only, they cannot run Ethernet. That is why they don't run at 10Gbps. They'll run at 2, 4, or 8Gbps, depending on the fabric you're connecting into.It looks like this Brocade switch is 10000 only on the FCoE ports- but not on the FC ports. I believe I do have licenses to use those ports, and I remember reading that you *can* configure them for FCoE, but I sure can't figure out how. Frustrating!
That's what I heard, too. Darned if I can figure it out though. I've scoured the docs and the CLI. Pretty certain it can't be done. Would *love* to be proved wrongI thought my coworker said these can be programmed to Ethernet ports or FC ports? It's part of the switch config...