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

Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide 23

53-1001336-02

PIDs and PID binding overview

• Any port on a 48-port blade can support up to 256 NPIV devices (In fixed addressing mode only

128 NPIV devices are supported in non-VF mode and 64 NPIV devices in VF mode on a 48-port

blade).

• Any port on a 48-port blade can support loop devices.

• Any port on a 48-port blade can support hard port zoning.

• Port index is not guaranteed to be equal to the port area ID.

256-area addressing mode

This configurable addressing mode is available only in a logical switch on the Brocade DCX and

DCX-4S platforms. In this mode, only 256 ports are supported and each port receives a unique

8-bit area address. This mode can be used in FICON environments, which have strict requirements

for 8-bit area FC addresses.

There are two types of area assignment modes in the 256-area addressing mode: zero-based and

port-based. Zero-based mode, which assigns areas as ports, are added to the partition, beginning

at area 0x00. This mode allows FICON customers to make use of the upper ports of a 48-port

blade; but this mode may not be compatible with domain,index zoning in InteropMode 2, because

M-EOS switches are not capable of handling indexes greater than 255. In both zero-based and

port-based modes, you can assign from the entire range 0x00 to 0xff for the PID. Port-based mode

does not support the upper 16 ports of a 48 port blade in a logical switch.

WWN-based PID assignment

WWN-based PID assignment allows you to configure a PID persistently using a device’s WWN.

When the device logs into the switch, the PID is bound to the device WWN. If the device is moved to

another port in the same switch, or a new blade is hot plugged, the device will receive the same PID

(area) at its next login.

This feature is deactivated by default. When the feature is enabled, bindings are created

dynamically; as new devices log in, they automatically enter the WWN-based PID database. The

bindings will exist until you explicitly unbind the mappings through the CLI or change to a different

addressing mode. If there are any existing devices when you enable the feature, you will need to

manually enter the WWN-based PID assignments through the CLI.

Once WWN-based PID assignment is enabled you need to manually enter the WWN-based PID

assignments through the CLI for any existing devices. Any new devices logging in will automatically

enter the WWN-based PID database. Current WWN-based PID bindings are cleared when you

change to a different addressing mode.

PID assignments are supported for a maximum of 4096 devices; this includes both point-to-point

and NPIV devices. The number of point-to-point devices supported depends directly on the areas

available. For example, 448 are available on an enterprise-class platform and 256 are available on

switches. When the number of entries in the WWN-based PID database reaches the number 4096

or areas are used up, the oldest unused entry is purged from the database to free up the reserved

area for the new FLOGI.

NPIV

If any NPIV devices have static PIDs configured and the acquired area is not the same as the one

being requested, the FDISC coming from that device is rejected and the error is noted in the

RASlog.