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Best Practice for setting up DS6510 Brocade Switch and virtual Fabrics
We just purchased a DS6510 Brocade Switch and want to configure two virtual fabrics on it. Has anyone had any experience with virtual fabrics and would care to share some pro's and con's about assigning ports, or best practice for performance, reduncany, etc...
Thanks.
felipon1
96 Posts
1
January 20th, 2012 01:00
Hi,
I don't have experience with DS6510 but I assume that the philosophy is the same as in the rest of Brocade switchs. When you enable VF in a switch (offline process), automatically default VF 128 is created and all ports are assigned to it. When it comes to assigning ports, this is an online process for the switch (the port resets when assigning it to a new VF).
As far as performance is concerned, I have not experienced any difference between the switchs with VF enabled and the switchs with this feature disabled, so I do not consider any drawback, at least, performancewise.
If you have experience with Cisco, an VF is equivalent to a Cisco VSAN (or ethernet vlan) and shares its characteristiscs: a Name server per VF, a Domain ID per VF, segregate traffic, etc.
Richard_Butler
84 Posts
1
January 27th, 2012 10:00
Hi,
Once you have enabled virtual fabrics you will be able to create logical switches with logical fabric IDs. I would recommend that once you have created a logical switch, then connect to it using the 'setcontext' command. Having done this, check the default zoning behavior; in my experience 'allaccess' will be enabled and you would probably want to disable this behavior. So:
Also, the FOS Administrator's Guide has a good section on Managing Virtual Fabrics, and also Routing Services between Virtual Fabrics.
Best regards, Richard.
gem_guy
60 Posts
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January 30th, 2012 08:00
Have you any "best practices" as far as which ports to assigned to which VF? Should I split the asics up or would it make a difference to just assign ports 0-23 to one VF and 24-47 to the other?
christopher_ime
2K Posts
1
February 8th, 2012 23:00
For best practices and an actual case study regarding Brocade Virtual Fabrics have a look at the relevant chapter in the "Fibre Channel SAN Topologies TechBook"
https://elabnavigator.emc.com/vault/pdf/FC_SAN.pdf
anand_daithanka
1 Message
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November 12th, 2013 04:00
Thanks Christopher for sharing FC SAN topology Techbook. It help me to understand virtual fabric concept & its configuration.