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About the Fabric Data Link

The data link is referred to as the fabric interface. It is used by the cluster's Packet Forwarding Engines to transmit transit traffic and to synchronize data plane dynamic runtime state. When the system creates the fabric interface, the software assigns it an internally derived IP address to be used for packet transmission.

The fabric is a physical connection between two nodes of a cluster and is formed by connecting a pair of Gigabit Ethernet interfaces back-to-back (one from each node).

Unlike for the control link, whose interfaces are determined by the system, you specify the physical interfaces to be used for the fabric data link in the configuration.

The fabric data link does not support fragmentation. To accommodate this state, jumbo frame support is enabled by default on the link with a maximum MTU size of 8980 bytes. To ensure that traffic that transits the data link does not exceed this size, we recommend that no other interface exceed the fabric data link's MTU size.

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