Brocade User Ports

Hi JimmyPxx. Sorry it took so long to get any response on your question (I've been busy and completely overlooked your post)

I hope this "kick" will get your question to people's attention.
AFAIK there's no such thing as "user ports". The most common way of zoning is wwn zoning. Do you perhaps mean the world wide port numbers ? Those are the wwn's of the port of the HBA's. In Brocade you can drill down in the alias screen under "Ports & Attached Devices", then choose the switch your host is attached to, then the port on that switch and you'll now see the wwnn of the HBA. Now drill down one level more and you'll see the wwpn. This is the wwn you need for zoning.

Uh, that's an really old thread but maybe it's interesting for others, too.

Brocade's directory use two different port numbering schemes. First the physical numbering where each port is identified by /. This number is used for all 'physical' things, like enabling/disabled ports, setting speed and so on.

The other numbering scheme is called port area id, this one is used for zoning/routing purposes. The naming is not really consistent here, when you issue a switchshow the area id is shown as index in the first column and the gui seems to call it user port number (not sure here, I seldom use the gui)

With switches the physical port number and area id is always the same (unless you use pid modes other than one), with directors this is different because a director can use different port blades. When you have a director with let's say two 16-port blades and you later swap the first blade with a 32-port one all subsequent port numbers would change, which is very undesirable. This is why Brocade introduced a fixed area id to port mapping scheme to ensure all area ids are consistent and don't change.

rgds,bernd