Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects with native Fibre Channel connectivity support SAN (Storage Area Network) and iFCP (Internet Fibre Channel Protocol). SAN directly utilizes Fibre Channel for dedicated and high-speed storage networks. iFCP enables the encapsulation of Fibre Channel frames within IP packets, which provides flexibility for storage networking.

When connecting a Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect in its default mode to a SAN, the operating mode is NPV mode (N Port Virtualization mode). In NPV mode, the fabric interconnect does not perform Fibre Channel switching itself but instead passes traffic to the SAN switch, thus acting as an end-host. This mode is the default setting for UCS Fabric Interconnects.

The Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM) is responsible for managing and propagating configurations to the virtual Ethernet modules (VEMs) in a Cisco Nexus 1000V Series switch. The VSM acts as the control point and ensures that configurations are distributed across the switches, maintaining consistency and centralized management.