Fabric Extend and ONA

Some hardware platforms support Fabric Extend natively on any of its physical ports. However, the VSP 4450 Series requires an Open Networking Adapter (ONA) to enable this functionality. The ONA is the Fabric Extend packet encapsulation engine for the VSP 4450 Series. The ONA / VSP 4450 Series combination can also provide enhanced features such as IP fragmentation and reassembly on Fabric Extend tunnels.

Note

Note

In a Layer 2 core Fabric Extend solution, the VSP 4450 Series does not require an ONA because the tunnels are point-to-point VLAN connections, not VXLAN. Therefore, there is no need for an ONA to encapsulate a VXLAN header to SPB packets.

The VSP 4450 Series manages the ONA in the following ways:

The ONA can operate in different modes. Fabric Extend is Operational Mode 1. To enable Fabric Extend, use the ONA‘s Manual Configuration menu to change the Operational Mode parameter to 1. For more information, refer to the manual that ships with the ONA.

In the following figure, the VSP 8200 Series is in a Fabric Connect network and is configured with Fabric Extend (FE). The VSP 4450 Series is also in a Fabric Connect network and is configured with SPB. The VSP 8200 Series and the VSP 4450 Series use industry-standard VXLAN tunnels to create a flow for FE traffic between the VSP 8200 Series and the ONA attached to the VSP 4450 Series.

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Fabric Extend traffic flow

The following flow occurs when User A sends a packet to User B:

The following flow occurs when User B sends a packet to User A: