High availability and multipathing for fibre channel over ethernet

Abstract

A physical Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) switch defines a multipath virtual FCoE switch to provide uninterrupted storage access between N_PORTs of an FCoE host and a Fiber Channel (FC) storage target, for example, in response to an F_PORT failure. Through the multipath virtual FCoE switch, the fabric is configured with multiple physical paths available between the FCoE hosts and FC targets. The multipath virtual FCoE switch is defined between or among multiple physical FCoE switches coupled to the Ethernet fabric. One of the F_PORTs is designated as being in the primary FCoE path, while any other F_PORTs sharing the virtual FCoE switch are reserved for standby paths in case the primary FCoE path is disabled. When a failure to a primary FCoE path is detected, a standby path is promoted to become a new primary FCoE path and subsequent traffic is routed in both directions through the new primary FCoE path.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.