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

Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide 411
53-1001336-02
Limitations and restrictions of Traffic Isolation Routing
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• Traffic Isolation Routing is not supported in fabrics with switches running firmware versions
earlier than Fabric OS v6.0.0. However, the existence of a TI zone in such a fabric is
backward-compatible and does not disrupt fabric operation in switches running earlier
firmware versions.
TI over FCR is not backward compatible with Fabric OS v6.0.x or earlier. The -1 in the
domain,index entries causes issues to legacy switches in a zone merge. Firmware downgrade
is prevented if TI over FCR zones exist.
Trunking with TI zones
Note the following if you implement trunking and TI zones:
• To include a trunk group in a TI zone, you must include all ports of the trunk in the TI zone.
• Trunked ISL ports cannot be members of more than one TI zone.
Limitations and restrictions of Traffic Isolation Routing
The following are limitations of TI zones:
• For switches running Fabric OS 6.1.0 or later, a maximum of 255 TI zones can be created in
one fabric. For switches running Fabric OS 6.0.x, no more than 239 TI zones should be
created.
A fabric merge resulting in greater than the maximum allowed TI zones results in merge failure
and the fabrics are segmented.
• A TI zone can be created using D,I (Domain, Index) notation only, except for TI zones in a
backbone fabric, which use port WWNs. See “Traffic Isolation Routing over FC routers” for
information about TI zones in a backbone fabric.
• To include a trunk group in a TI zone, you must include all ports of the trunk in the TI zone.
• Two N_Ports that have the same shared area should not be configured in different TI zones.
This limitation does not apply to E_Ports that use the same shared area on the FC4-48 and
FC8-48 port blades.
• Ports that are in different TI zones cannot communicate with each other if failover is disabled.
Admin Domain considerations for Traffic Isolation Routing
Note the following if you implement Admin Domains and TI zones:
• TI zones are applicable only in AD0, and the E_Ports that are members of a TI zone must be in
the AD0 device list. Because TI zones must use D,I notation, the AD0 device list must be
declared using D,I notation for ports that are to be used in TI zones.
• A port used in a TI zone should not be a member of multiple Admin Domains.
• Use care if defining TI zones with ports that are shared across Admin Domains because of the
limitation that a given port can appear in only one TI zone.
Best practice: Do not use ports that are shared across Admin Domains in a TI zone.