FC in Oracle Solaris has the following key features:
Dynamic storage discovery – Oracle Solaris automatically recognizes devices and any modifications made to device configurations. This feature makes devices available to the system without requiring you to reboot or manually change information in configuration files.
FC booting – Oracle Solaris supports booting from FC devices.
Fibre Channel virtualization – N Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) is an extension to the FC standard, which enables an FC port to create many virtual ports on a physical port. This feature is useful for virtualization environments such as LDoms, and Oracle VM Server for SPARC based and x86 based systems.
Fibre Channel SR-IOV – This technology is available for Oracle VM Server for SPARC. For more information about Oracle VM server on SPARC, see Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.3 Administration Guide.
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) – A new T11 standard to transport encapsulated FC frames over enhanced Ethernet. The Oracle Solaris FCoE is a software implementation that is designed to work with normal Ethernet controllers.
IP over fibre channel (IPFC) - Creating IP interface into the fibre channel protocol. See RFC 2625. For more information, see Configuring IPFC SAN Devices.
OpenBoot PROM (OBP) commands – Can scan and access FC storage devices.
FC-HBA library – This library was previously known as the Storage Networking Industry Association Fibre Channel host bus adapter (SNIA FC-HBA) library. The FC-HBA library application programming interfaces (APIs) enable the management of FC HBAs, and provide a standard-based interface for other applications. These FC-HBA APIs can be used to gather information about FC HBAs.
For more information about common FC-HBA APIs, see the libhbaapi(3LIB) man page. Also see, Appendix F, Supported FC-HBA API, in Writing Device Drivers for Oracle Solaris 11.3.
QLogic supports FCIP 4G version HBAs, and does not support 8G and higher version HBAs.
For more information about FC specifications, go to INCITS.org.