Important Points - FEX (Fabric Extender in Nexus) - Part 1

Important Points – FEX (Fabric Extender in Nexus)- Part 1
 It is one of the most important line cards in Nexus Family. It is of 2000 Series. It stands for Fabric
Extender.
 It is Brainless device which does not have its own CPU or control Plane. It can’t be configured
without the help of Parent switch.
 It does not have any console or Aux port for connecting your workstation.
 It has to be managed and configured from Parent switch. Parent can be either 5000 or 7000.
 It is mostly being used with Nexus 5000 devices because Nexus 5000 does not have additional
Line cards. Not all of the models of Nexus 7000 support FEX.
 It will have two kind of ports, i.e. Fabric ports and Front Panel Ports
 Fabric Ports connect to Parent Switch(s) while Front Panel Ports are used to connect Servers of
workstations.
 Once FEX is connected, It will appear as an additional Line Card on Parent Switch.
 FrontPanel ports of FEX can’t be used to Switches because BPDUGuard is enabled by default.
Portfast is also enabled. If you connect Switch, port goes to error disabled state.
 No numbering on Fabric Ports.
 We do not have to install any NXOS image separately on FEX i.e. Nexus 2000 series device.
Actually it downloads the NXOS automatically from Parent Switch once it is connected properly.
 No Local Switching- It means that two devices connected to same FEX can’t communicate
without going through Parent Switch. Every time Traffic will pass thru Parent Switch.
 Maximum 12 FEX devices can be connected to a Single Parent Switch.
 FEX feature has to be enabled before using it using “feature fex”
 There are two ways to configure Switchports connected to FEX. First is Static Pinning and Second
is Port Channel
 Static Pinning means you are binding each port. Port channel will have multiple ports logically
bundled.
 You have to configure switchport of Parent Switch to “fex-fabric” mode using “switchport mode
fex-fabric” command
 You can check the status of connected FEX devices using “Show fex”. It takes 10 minutes to get
discovered and appear in the output.
 Once fex is configured then all of the ports of front panel of fex will appear in the output of
“Show interface status”.
 Every FEX should be assigned a number. It starts from 100. If FEX number is configured as 101 ,
then first port of front panel of fex will appear as Eth101/1/1. If FEX number is 109 then second
port will appear as Eth109/1/2.
 Command to assign number to FEX is “fex fex-number”. So for number 100, you can use “fex
100”.
 After that you have to attach the interface with this fex number. Go under the Interface ethx/x,
then fex associate fex-number.
 So for interface eth1/13. Use the command
Config terminal
Interface eth1/13
Fex associate 100
 Also note that you need to configure pinning . You can do so using below command
 Config terminal
 Fex 100
 Pinning max-links Number
 You can use number has 1 or 2 or whatever. It means how many links will be used for
connecting FEX. Also note that once you change or define pinning, it flaps the connection. So it
has to be done initially only.
 If you are using two links then It will be 2. But if you are using port channel then pinning will be 1
only.
 You can use the command “Show run fex” to see the configuration of fex.
 Status of FEX should be “Online” once it starts functioning.
 If FEX connection is lost somehow- then you do not have to worry about losing configuration
because Parent Switch stores it’s configuration. FEX number is retained once it reconnects.
 One FEX can be connected to multiple Parent Switches as well.
 Suggestion is always to use port channel at Parent Switch end for connecting FEX. Even if one of
the ports inside port channel flaps somehow- It wouldn’t have any impact to FEX.
 If You use Static Pinning without Port channel, Then you have to Map front panel ports. So if you
have two ports 13,14 being used for connecting FEX and if FEX has 48 ports in front panel- Then
first half of the ports will be mapped to port 13 and next 24 with port 14. So if port 13 goes
down then don’t think that first 24 ports of Front panel ports will work. These will remain down.
That’s the problem with static pinning with physical interfaces
 If you want to switch the non-working ports in case of fabric port failure- Then use the
command “fex pinning redistribute fex-number” in privilege mode.

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