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Systems & Data Center · Advanced

Fabric Interconnect (FI)

A pair of Cisco UCS switches that provide unified LAN and SAN connectivity and host UCS Manager for connected servers.

Definition

Fabric interconnects (A and B) operate as a cluster for management and as independent data planes for redundancy. They typically run in end-host mode for Ethernet and NPV mode for Fibre Channel, appearing to upstream switches as hosts.

Example

Each blade's vNIC pins to FI-A or FI-B with fabric failover enabled.

Exam tip

FIs are clustered for management only; data traffic on fabric A and B is independent.

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