On The NPV Driver Design And Realization For FCoE Protocol

The emergence of the Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) has pushed data center into a new era of convergence. Network is an important infrastructure of data center, which usually comprises of two parts, namely, the front-end computing network and the back-end storage network. FCoE is able to realize seamless integration of these two parts. FCoE reduces the costs of the data center'infrastructure in terms of the operation, maintenance and administration cost per unit, while supporting heterogeneous network environment and different interface types.The maximum number of switches in a Storage Area Network (SAN) is limited to 239 by the utilized eight bits ID Domain. N Port Virtualization (NPV)can be employed to overcome this constraint, enabling more servers or storage devices to be connected to the SAN network, hence expanding network capacity significantly. In the converged network based on FCoE protocol, the NPV switch is located at the edge access layer, acting as a proxy between the node device and the upstream FCoE switch (FCF). NPV switch acts as agent when sending the protocol packets to the core switch, which forwards the upstream traffic from the mapping port by checking the mapping table and the downstream traffic by checking the routing table.This thesis focuses on the realization of NPV switch driver layer in the context of the FCoE protocol. And the primary work includes three parts, namely,the requirements analysis, design and implementation, testing and verification.This paper first introduces the development of FCoE, the current situation of NPV technology research and the main research work of NPV. Secondly, the paper summarizes related technology, then analyzes the requirements of NPV switch'driver layer, more specifically analyzes each function module in detail. The main functions include mode switching, VSAN binding and unbundling, FCoE function enabling, VFC interface processing, routing and forwarding modules.Virtualization based data center is becoming a trend. Therefore, Multitenant Device Context (MDC) virtualization should be considered into the implementation of the above functions, which requires a complete 1: N network equipment virtualization support. By doing so, we can divide a physical equipment through software virtualization into multiple logical equipments,and this virtualized logical devices are referred to as MDC. On the basis of this, the design and implementation are carried out. And all the devised functions are tested on a testbed, which confirms the realization of all the design objectives.The analysis and design in this thesis may provide a useful reference for the further study and optimization of the NPV switch based on the FCoE protocol.