I'm not sure what you mean by the CFS tab. I'm running FM 3.2(3a).
IMO, it's too bad McData fell down and lost their technical advantage.; they really knew how to manage a SAN.

If you open FM server and expand "end devices" in the bottom left pain, there will be a device-alias section. Highlight that and the CFS tab will show in the right hand pain. Anway, CLI or GUI, does anyone know why I would have different device aliases across my switches? Everything is set to distribute.

It appears that my "A" fabric has 884 entries, while all the switches in the "B" fabric have 659.

Message was edited by:
nuggetz

Replacing an HBA thru FM is weird. CLI is the way the go but I do most of my device alias work thru FM and I need to know what I'm doing wrong and what's causing each switch to have a different amount of device aliases defined on each switch.

I prefer cli when it comes to managing alias'

config terminal
device-alias database
device-alias name pwwn
device-alias commit

One piece I don't know how to do is how to rename a pwwn to a different alias - like if you reuse a host/hba.

our environment consists of 2 9513 directors, and 4 cisco HP blade switches.
each fabric has 1 9513 and 2 blade switches.

we have the 9513 directors set as the Master in each fabric.

You shouldn't expect to see everything identical in each Fabric but in each Fabric, each switch should have the same configuration.

Jim is correct in that each fabric may or may not have the same number of aliases. Are you thinking that each fabric should have the same number of aliases?

Thank you.

What I was thinking earlier was that device aliases were global across the SAN but now I think it make sense that they should be specific to each fabric. So the fact that the numbers differ isn't the concern. What is of concern is the fact that there are device aliases that appear in both databases. I'm not sure how they got there. The aliases in question have the same names and wwns. I know sometimes FM will error out if an alias already exists under a different wwn which is expected but I'm trying to figure out how I have 50 entries that are common to both databases in 2 separate fabrics. Also, do I need to set a master in FM for both fabrics as I only have one selected right now.

Were the attached devices in both fabrics at some time or were they always limited to only one Fabric? CFS handles the updates of the aliases and it should handle any issues of duplicates.

Brocade for president ! I obviously prefer Brocade.
One of the things I hate about Cisco is that you have some sort of control over what info is distributed to other switches. With the original SAN vendors simply everything (aliases, zones and zonesets) was sent to each and every switch, so you couldn't make mistakes or overwrite data on other switches, since the whole config was identical on each switch.