IPFC Considerations

The following table shows the supported features available for IPFC.

Table 10-1 IPFC (NFS/NAS and SNDR)

Feature	Supported
Cascading	Yes, with fabric zones only
Zone type	Fabric zone with the HBA configured as an F-port point-to-point connection
Maximum number of device ports per zone	253

The following restrictions apply:

IPFC is not supported on Oracle 1 Gbit switches.
Promiscuous mode is not supported. The snoop utility cannot be used.
Multicasting is supported through broadcasting only.
Network cards using IPFC cannot be used as routers. In the Oracle Solaris OS, IP forwarding is disabled by default.
Any standard network commands can be used after IPFC is attached. These commands (telnet, ping, or ftp) are used in this environment in the same way as in an Ethernet setup.

Determining Fibre Channel Adapter Port Instances

This section explains how to configure the desired host system for IPFC. It includes the procedures to determine the port instance and to plumb an IPFC instance.

How to Determine Port Instances

Determine the HBA PCI adapter slot and the I/O board PCI slot.
You need this information to perform the calculation in Determining Fibre Channel Adapter Port Instances.
The examples in this procedure assume you have an array with an HBA card located in PCI adapter slot 5, and the PCI adapter is in slot 1 of the I/O board.
Determine the instance number.
1. Search for the fp driver binding name in the /etc/path_to_inst file.
  Note - Determine the correct entry by finding the hardware path described in your server hardware manual.
2. Narrow the search by using the I/O board and slot information from Step 1.
  Note - The following method of deriving the device path of an HBA from its physical location in server might not work for all Oracle's Sun server hardware.
  1. Multiply the PCI adapter slot number by the number of adapter ports.
    For example, if the HBA has two ports, multiply by 2. Using the array with an HBA in the PCI adapter slot 5, multiply 5 by 2 to get 10.
  2. Add the PCI adapter I/O board slot number to the number derived in Step i.
    Using an HBA in PCI adapter slot 5 and PCI slot 1 of the I/O board, add 1 to 10 for a sum of 11.
  3. Convert the number derived in Step ii to hexadecimal.
    The number 11 converts to “b” in hexadecimal.
  4. Search for the fp entry with pci@ hex where hex is the number you derived in Step iii.
    The following table shows the elements of the device path for a PCI single FC network adapter device that has the following path:
```
"/pci@b,2000/SUNW,qlc@2/fp@0,0" 7 "fp"
```
    Device Name
    
    Value
    
    Physical Name
    
    /pci@b,2000/SUNW,qlc@2/fp@0,0
    
    Instance Number
    
    7
    
    Driver Binding Name
    
    fp
3. Manually create each FP instance.
  In this example, the value of interface-number is fcip7.
```
# ipadm create-ip fcip7
```
  If the command is successful, a message appears on both the console and in the messages file. For example:
```
Sep 13 15:52:30 bytownite ip: ip: joining multicasts failed (7) on fcip0 - 
will use link layer brocasts for multicast
```

How to Create an IPFC Instance

Each FP instance on the system has an entry in /dev/fc. If HBAs have been removed, some stale links might exist. Use this procedure to load and create IPFC.

For each entry in /dev/fc file, display all the devices that are visible through that HBA port:

# luxadm -e dump_map /dev/fc/fp0
Pos  Port_ID Hard_Addr Port WWN         Node WWN         Type
0    610100  0         210000e08b049f53 200000e08b049f53 0x1f (Unknown Type)
1    620d02  0         210000e08b02c32a 200000e08b02c32a 0x1f (Unknown Type)
2    620f00  0         210000e08b03eb4b 200000e08b03eb4b 0x1f (Unknown Type)
3    620e00  0         210100e08b220713 200100e08b220713 0x1f (Unknown Type,Host Bus Adapter)
# luxadm -e dump_map /dev/fc/fp1
 No FC devices found. - /dev/fc/fp1

Based on the list of devices, determine which destination HBAs are visible to the remote host with which you want to establish IPFC communications.
In the example for this procedure, the destination HBAs have port IDs 610100 and 620d02. The originating HBA’s port ID is 620e00.
List the physical path of the originating HBA port from which you can see the destination HBA port, where originating-hba-link is a variable for the link determined in Step 2.
```
# ls -l /dev/fc/fp originating-hba-link
```
In the following example, 0 is the number for the originating-hba-link:
```
# ls -l /dev/fc/fp 0
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root          51 Sep  4 08:23 /dev/fc/fp0 ->
../../devices/pci@8,600000/SUNW,qlc@1/fp@0,0:devctl
```
Search the physical path identified in Step 3.
You must remove the leading ../../devices from the path name output. For example:
```
# grep pci@8,600000/SUNW,qlc@1/fp@0,0 /etc/path_to_inst 
"/pci@8,600000/SUNW,qlc@1/fp@0,0" 0 "fp"
```
Determine the fp instance for the originating HBA port from the output of the command in Step 4.
The instance number precedes “fp” in the output. In the following example output, the instance number is 0.
```
"/pci@8,600000/SUNW,qlc@1/fp@0,0" 0 "fp"
```
Use the instance number from Step 5 to load IPFC and create the IPFC interface.
In this example, the instance is 0.
```
# ipadm create-ip fcip 0
```

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