Brocade Fabric OS Administrator's Guide Supporting Fabric OS v6.3.0 (53-1001336-02, November 2009)

Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide 199
53-1001336-02
Chapter
10
Managing Virtual Fabrics
In this chapter
•Virtual Fabrics overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
•Logical switch overview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
•Logical fabric overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
•Management model for logical switches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
•Account management and Virtual Fabrics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
•Supported platforms for Virtual Fabrics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
•Limitations and restrictions of Virtual Fabrics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212
•Enabling Virtual Fabrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
•Disabling Virtual Fabrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
•Configuring logical switches to use basic configuration values . . . . . . . . . 215
•Creating a logical switch or base switch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
•Executing a command in a different logical fabric context. . . . . . . . . . . . . 217
•Deleting a logical switch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
•Adding and removing ports on a logical switch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218
•Displaying logical switch configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
•Changing the fabric ID of a logical switch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
•Changing a logical switch to a base switch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
•Configuring a logical switch to use XISLs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
•Changing the context to a different logical fabric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
•Creating a logical fabric using XISLs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
Virtual Fabrics overview
Virtual Fabrics is an architecture to virtualize hardware boundaries. Traditionally, SAN design and
management is done at the granularity of a physical switch. The Virtual Fabrics feature allows SAN
design and management to be done at the granularity of a port.
Virtual Fabrics is a suite of related features that can be customized based on your needs. The
Virtual Fabrics suite consists of the following specific features:
• Logical switch
• Logical fabric
• Device sharing