Brocade FICON Administrator's Guide v7.1.0 (53-1002753-01, March 2013)

FICON Administrator’s Guide 53

53-1002753-01

Configuration requirements for switches and Backbones

• When running FICON emulation features over an FCIP tunnel, it is highly recommended that

both switches providing the FCIP tunnel are using the same Fabric OS release level.

High integrity fabric requirements for cascaded configurations

You can use extended FICON connections between or through Brocade 7800 Extension Switches or

FX8-24 blade to create a cascaded FICON switched configuration. The fabric must be set up to

provide a secure, or high integrity, fabric to enable this configuration to operate in an IBM

environment. See Chapter 2, “Administering FICON Fabrics” for an explanation of these

requirements.

FICON emulation requirement for a determinate path

FICON emulation processing creates FICON commands and responses on extended CHPIDs, and

intercepts all exchanges between a channel and a CU. For FICON Emulation processing to function

correctly, all the exchanges between a channel and CU must take a single tunnel path.

There are two ways to ensure a determinate path for FICON commands and responses:

• Define only one FCIP tunnel between sites.

• Use a Traffic Isolation zone (TI Zone) to assign a specific tunnel to Channel and control unit

ports. In the cases where multiple tunnels are required between a pair of FICON switches (or

Logical Switches), use TIZ to define ports that should use specific tunnels.

FCIP tunnel between sites

The Brocade 7800 and FX8-24 uses FCIP Trunking features to overcome the limitation of one

Ethernet interface, one IP address and one FCIP tunnel. In Fabric OS v6.3 and later an FCIP Tunnel

is created with multiple FCIP circuits over different IP interfaces to provide WAN load balancing and

failover recovery in the event of a limited WAN outage. This provides a highly redundant WAN

configuration for all FICON or FCP emulation technologies with Fabric OS. Figure 14 shows that a

tunnel can have up to 4 circuits per GbE port.

FIGURE 14 FCIP tunnel and circuits