Patent ID: 8165136

Claim:
A method, comprising: receiving a frame from a first port, wherein the frame is a Fibre Channel frame; transmitting the frame or a copy thereof to a second port, the second port being identified in a header of the frame, wherein at least one of the first port or the second port is a virtual port; determining whether at least one of traffic received from the first port or traffic addressed to the second port is to be analyzed; obtaining a Fibre Channel Identifier (FCID) and Virtual Storage Area Network (VSAN) identifier from the frame; and ascertaining a third port associated with the FCID and VSAN identifier, wherein the third port is configured to disregard the buffer-to-buffer credit flow control mechanism of the Fibre Channel protocol; transmitting the frame or a copy thereof to the third port, thereby enabling an analyzer coupled to the third port to analyze traffic received by the third port; wherein determining whether at least one of traffic received from the first port or traffic addressed to the second port is to be analyzed and transmitting the frame or a copy thereof to the third port is performed by a virtualization engine of a line card; and wherein transmitting the frame or a copy thereof to the third port is performed when it is determined that at least one of traffic received from the first port or traffic addressed to the second port is to be analyzed.