RRR,

Don't you need a license to setup a trunk on Brocade ?

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Depending on the distance you do (not) need an "extended fabric" license for trunking. Under 10 kilometers you don't need the extra license.

To create a trunk put the ports in E mode (trunking) and connect them. In the GUI in "switch admin" in the "extended fabric" tab, you need to set the long distance setting to LD: Auto or LS: . You'd better use the distance setting which the switch proposes (or add about 10%).

If you exceed 300 meters and still would like to have a really fast connection, you'll need long wave SFP's. You could choose CWDM or DWDM to use the dark fiber better, since you might connect the 2 switches using 2 different wavelengths and LAN switches for example using 2 other wavelengths. This way you'll have 4 connections using only 1 dark fiber pair.

Zoning is exactly the same, since the switches on both sides of the dark fiber will merge to a single large fabric.

What about the Extended fabric license would this be applicable here? Also what about this being considered with only switches no cwdm or dwdm as this is dark fibre between two sites with good connectivity.

Indeed, (I'm confused with Cisco). On brocade you always need a license for truning. Just make sure you also buy the extended one if you exceed the 10km.

Is it necessary for me to do the trunking as I'm planning to merge one switch each from (Primary and DR) as on fabric.

Similarly the same is for the other switch. ( 2 switches on the Primary and 2 on the DR in total)

it's not necessary but if you have redundant links going from site A to site B why not trunk them together and create one big pipe versus two smaller pipes. You add redundancy and performance that way.  If one link in a trunk goes down, it will not affect availability (might decrease performance).

Thanks Dynamox, for the input regarding trunking.

Here since I am setting this up for the first time and this would involve replacing the old switches with new ones (DS 5300 and DS 5100's) at the Primary and DR site respectively would it be a good idea to replace the switches and then set up the ISL.

I was thinking of following these steps:

-Replacing the switches at Primary with Domain id's 1 and 2

-Replacing the switches at the Secondary with Domain id's 3 and 4.(Both would be done seperately)

-Zoning both the switches with the respective servers.

-Checking the lun acess in terms of servers and powerpath and connectivity.

Over here would doing the isl when connecting the DR switches directly help or can this be done later after all the above activity is completed?e

If you could let me know what would be the be the best option.

Also to add for the ISL, I am using extended LW sfp's and have extended fabric license. I would be connecting the fabric over the same port (example port 31 to 31) over dark fibre between the two sites and then run the

portcfglongdistance [slotnumber/]portnumber [distance_level]

[vc_translation_link_init] [desired_distance]

Should there be any further considerations taken in terms of zones/ running config or any other parameters, I'm just trying to get all things in place before doing this activity the next week?

AJ,

take a look at Brocade Fabric OS guide (for whichever version you are using), there is a section on ISL/Trunking. You have to do some planning in terms of which ports will be used for ISL/Trunking and other best practices. If you can't find this document on PowerLink ..check out MyBrocade. You will see in the guide that some things are disruptive to existing fabrics (like enabling trunking license) so that may impact how you do things in your migration to the new switches.