Brocade DCX "portcfgfill" at 8 Gb/s

We had an interesting question come up today, and I wanted to bounce it off you (I’m opening a case with EMC also.).

We recently bought an HP c7000 Blade Enclosure with HP FlexFabric modules in the back. 8 Gb/s. We’ve been having trouble with the Linux servers on the Blades with SAN Storage. Dm-mpio failed paths. After some research we (not me) found the following article on the Internet:

http://community.brocade.com/thread/6287

which says we should set “portcfgfillword” to 3 for our Blade Chassis with FlexFabric modules with 8 Gb/s ports.

Is this true? What do you know about this?

We also bought a new HP 3PAR P10000 V400 Storage Array with 8 Gb/s ports. Should we set “portcfgfillword” to 3 for those ports also? Should we set ALL 8 Gb/s GBICs on the DCX SAN Switches portcfgfillword” to 3? When we do the ISL between the 2 x logical fabrics should we set those 8 Gb/s ports to portcfgfillword” to 3?

I also saw a case in this forum about "portcfgfillword", but no concrete answers.

Stuart

Responses(3)

A

Anonymous

5 Practitioner

•

274.2K Posts

0

February 22nd, 2012 18:00

Hello Stuart

Some 8G devices are not capable of properly establishing links with Brocade 8G Fibre Channel switches when ARB/ARB or IDLE/ARB primitives are used. These 8G devices require the legacy IDLE/IDLE sequence to achieve successful link initialization. To address this issue, Brocade has provided the ability to configure any of the three possible combinations (IDLE/IDLE, ARB/ARB, or IDLE/ARB) for link initialization and fill words. Any of these modes can be configured on an individual port basis using the CLI protcfgfillword. Changing the mode is disruptive for the port regardless of the speed at which the port is operating. The setting is retained and applied any time an 8 G device logs in.

Note: Not Required on ISL Ports

Thanks

Chetan

StuartA58

138 Posts

0

February 23rd, 2012 07:00

Chetan:

Why isn't this required for ISLs?

Stuart

StuartA58

138 Posts

0

February 28th, 2012 12:00

We have Connectrix Manager Data Center Edition 10.4.3. Can I set the "fill word" from Connectrix Manager?

I can't even figure out how to see the "fill word" in Connectrix Manager?

Stuart

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