Cisco Technology, Inc.

Tushar Desai

Kalyan Ghosh

Praveen Jain

Shashank Gupta

Kalyan K Ghosh

N_Ports and F_Ports are provided with logic allowing designation of multiple virtual interfaces on a single host bus adaptor or other Fiber Channel interface, one virtual interface for each VSAN operating on the node interface. Node ports with this additional functionality are referred to as trunking N_Ports or TN_Ports. These ports have a functional design allowing creation of the multiple virtual interfaces as appropriate for the application at hand. This port design also includes logic for communicating with a peer fabric port to initialize and modify the configuration of the virtual interfaces on the TN_Port. A corresponding functional design and communication logic is provided for fabric ports, referred to herein as trunking F_Ports or TF_Ports.

Trunking for fabric ports in Fibre channel switches and attached devices

Methods and devices are provided for detecting whether peer ports interconnecting two network devices can perform a novel protocol called Exchange Peer Parameters ('EPP'). If the peer ports are so configured to perform EPP, EPP services are exchanged between the peer ports. In a first phase, information is exchanged about peer port configurations of interest. In a second phase, the results of the exchange of information are applied to hardware and/or software of the respective ports, as needed.

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Foster City, CA, United States of America

Tushar Desai