Skip to main content
  • Place orders quickly and easily
  • View orders and track your shipping status
  • Enjoy members-only rewards and discounts
  • Create and access a list of your products
  • Manage your Dell EMC sites, products, and product-level contacts using Company Administration.

Dell PowerEdge FN I/O Module Configuration Guide 9.10(0.0)

PDF

How Priority-Based Flow Control is Implemented

Priority-based flow control provides a flow control mechanism based on the 802.1p priorities in converged Ethernet traffic received on an interface and is enabled by default. As an enhancement to the existing Ethernet pause mechanism, PFC stops traffic transmission for specified priorities (CoS values) without impacting other priority classes. Different traffic types are assigned to different priority classes.

When traffic congestion occurs, PFC sends a pause frame to a peer device with the CoS priority values of the traffic that needs to be stopped. DCBx provides the link-level exchange of PFC parameters between peer devices. PFC creates zero-loss links for SAN traffic that requires no-drop service, while at the same time retaining packet-drop congestion management for LAN traffic.

PFC is implemented on an Aggregator as follows:
  • If DCB is enabled, as soon as a dcb-map with PFC is applied on an interface, DCBx starts exchanging information with PFC-enabled peers. The IEEE802.1Qbb, CEE and CIN versions of PFC TLV are supported. DCBx also validates PFC configurations received in TLVs from peer devices.
  • To achieve complete lossless handling of traffic, enable PFC operation on ingress port traffic and on all DCB egress port traffic.
  • All 802.1p priorities are enabled for PFC. Queues to which PFC priority traffic is mapped are lossless by default. Traffic may be interrupted due to an interface flap (going down and coming up).
  • For PFC to be applied on an Aggregator port, the auto-configured priority traffic must be supported by a PFC peer (as detected by DCBx).
  • A dcb-map for PFC applied to an interface may become invalid if dot1p-queue mapping is reconfigured. This situation occurs when the new dot1p-queue assignment exceeds the maximum number (2) of lossless queues supported globally on the switch. In this case, all PFC configurations received from PFC-enabled peers are removed and re-synchronized with the peer devices.
  • Dell Networking OS does not support MACsec Bypass Capability (MBC).

Rate this content

Accurate
Useful
Easy to understand
Was this article helpful?
0/3000 characters
  Please provide ratings (1-5 stars).
  Please provide ratings (1-5 stars).
  Please provide ratings (1-5 stars).
  Please select whether the article was helpful or not.
  Comments cannot contain these special characters: <>()\