Cisco UCS 2200 Series Fabric Extenders bring the unified fabric into the blade server enclosure, providing multiple 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections between blade servers and the fabric interconnect, simplifying diagnostics, cabling, and management. It is a second-generation I/O module (IOM) that shares the same form factor with the first-generation Cisco UCS 2100 Series Fabric Extenders IOM and is backward-compatible with the shipping Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis.

The Cisco UCS 2200 Series extends the I/O fabric between the Cisco UCS 6100 and 6200 Series Fabric Interconnects and the Cisco UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis, enabling a lossless and deterministic Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) fabric to connect all blades and chassis together. Since the fabric extender is similar to a distributed line card, it does not perform any switching and is managed as an extension of the fabric interconnects. This approach removes switching from the chassis, reducing overall infrastructure complexity and enabling Cisco UCS to scale to many chassis without multiplying the number of switches needed, reducing TCO and allowing all chassis to be managed as a single, highly available management domain.

The Cisco UCS 2200 Series also manages the chassis environment (the power supply and fans as well as the blades) in conjunction with the fabric interconnect. Therefore, separate chassis management modules are not required.