Bundle that includes one 2304 plus 8 Fabric Extender Transceivers (FETs)

Cisco UCS 2304 Fabric Extender brings the unified fabric into the blade server enclosure, providing Gigabit Ethernet connectivity between the blade servers and the fabric interconnect, simplifying diagnostics, cabling, and management. It is a third-generation I/O Module (IOM) that shares the same form factor as the second-generation Cisco UCS 2200 Series Fabric Extenders and is backward compatible with the shipping Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis.

The Cisco UCS 2304 connects the I/O fabric between the Cisco UCS 6300 Series Fabric Interconnects and the Cisco UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis, enabling a lossless and deterministic Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) fabric to connect all blades and chassis together. Because the fabric extender is similar to a distributed line card, it does not perform any switching and is managed as an extension of the fabric interconnects. This approach removes switching from the chassis, reducing overall infrastructure complexity and enabling Cisco UCS to scale to many chassis without multiplying the number of switches needed, reducing TCO and allowing all chassis to be managed as a single, highly available management domain.

The Cisco UCS 2304 Fabric Extender has four 40 Gigabit Ethernet, FCoE-capable, Quad Small Form-Factor Pluggable (QSFP ) ports that connect the blade chassis to the fabric interconnect. Each Cisco UCS 2304 can provide one 40 Gigabit Ethernet ports connected through the midplane to each half-width slot in the chassis, giving it a total eight 40G interfaces to the compute. Typically configured in pairs for redundancy, two fabric extenders provide up to 320 Gbps of I/O to the chassis.

Note:

There is an updated version of UCS-IOM-2304 (I.e., UCS-IOM-2304V2).

1. You cannot mix UCS-IOM-2304V2 and UCS-IOM-2304 in the same chassis.

2. UCS-IOM-2304V2 requires Cisco UCS Manager 4.0(4) or later.

Performance

• Hardware forwarding at 960 Gbps
• Low-latency cut-through design, providing predictable, consistent traffic latency regardless of packet size, traffic pattern, or enabled features

• Layer 2 VLAN trunks
• IEEE 802.1Q VLAN encapsulation
• Support for up to 1024 VLANs and Virtual SANs (VSANs)
• Support for Data Center VM-FEX architecture
• Jumbo frames on all ports (up to 9216 bytes)
• Pause frames (IEEE 802.3x)

• Layer 2 IEEE 802.1p (Class of Service [CoS])
• CoS-based egress queuing
• Egress strict-priority queuing
• Egress port-based scheduling: Weighted Round Robin (WRR)
• Eight hardware queues per port

• Up to two fabric extenders can work in the Cisco UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis
• Active/active data-plane operation with failover
• Capability to fail over from one fabric extender to another in the event of a failure
• Active/passive management-plane operation
• Support for nonstop management-plane functions; if the active fabric extender fails, the passive fabric extender takes over the chassis management functions