isl mds 9000 switches

I'm getting there slowly. The emc100582 has a lot of info, it just takes a while to digest whats there. "Network Storage Topology Guide" is very helpful, although I did not find it via a powerlink search, I used google (should have started there) and found it under the elabnavigator.emc.com - which makes sense I guess It just never occured to me to look there.

Trunking will occur for each VSAN. So yes if you are allowing all VSANs to trunk and a particular VSAN doesn't exist on the other switch it will not have access to that trunk.

Along with trunking you may want to look into using Port Channels. Port Channels are a logical interface that are made up of physical interfaces. So in your case you would put your TE ports into a port channel. The reason to do this is if a TE port drops and re-establishes a connection frequently it could cause some disruption to the other devices plugged into that switch. So for a port channel to toggle like that all the ports within it would have to drop and come back online at the same time.

May I ask what your overall goal is in connecting these 2 switches? This may help come up with some additional tips.

I'll try to keep this short but its been a long story. We have a pair of 9509's that have what was all of our production, test, dev, backup attached to it. Most of this was production and is moving to a remote data center. A pair of 9216's was purchased to run the "few leftover systems and storage" that are to remain here. Of course the size of what will remain has changed so for no particular reason other than to increase our port count another pair of 9216's was purchased. There are 2 sort of logical island groups that exist but it would be better if they were put together. So first I need to migrate whats left on the 9509's to the 9216's, at some point I'll isl the 9216's not sure when just yet.
In my research I did see the Port Channel option and do plan to use it. At the moment I'm struggling with "make sure the vsan domainid's are unique" and coming up with a plan for migrating the 9509's - I was kicking around the idea of using an isl and ivr to aid in the migration, many have suggested its probably more trouble than its worth

As you are probably aware a lot of things need to happen for the fabrics to merge when you connect the 2 switches together. Do you currently have anything running on the 9216s that you plan to move to? If not you should be able to create the VSANs that are on the 9509 that you need to stay in that location. You can then ISL the switches together. Once that is complete you can start moving the ports from the 9509 to 9216. There are few config changes that might be helpful to change (domain ID, domain allowed list, vsan priority, zoneset distribution).

If you currently have things running the destination 9216 and can't switch VSANs around, IVR could be a solution. Or, I'm assuming all servers have 2 connections to your switches, you move half the ports all at once and the other half at another time. That way its not a outage for the host but just has them in a "degraded" state for a moment.

Let me know if any of these work or would like some more detail on some things. I was a bit quick, have to get prepared for New Years.