Brocade Connectivity

[VSG]

Hi Everyone,

    I'm looking at planning a switch upgrade and I'm still to be an expert on this, thought I'll gather my thoughts on this and put it across over here.

The task at hand goes this way:

I have two DS 4300 switches at a Primary site connected to EMC storage arrays and have 2 DS 300B switches connected to Storage at the DR site.

I'm looking at doing the following replacing the primary sites switches with the DS 5300 switches and the secondary site with DS 5100 switches and then

having an ISL between each of the switches say one port on each switch.(one port of the Primary to one port on the secondary switch)

      ______                              ISL                                ______

      I         1 (-------------------------------------------------------------) I 1       I                            ( 1 and 2 are the switches)

      I_____ 2 (------------------------------------------------------------) I_2___ |  

        Primary                                                                Secondary Fabric

I'm looking at setting this up over 80km over dark fibre and have the extended fabric license and the ELW SFP's to connect the sfps.  What are the factors that I should into consideration to have the connectivity established in terms of setting this up for the zone, configuration and so that these fabrics are merged?

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?

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 portnumber

#portcfglongdistance 0  LD 1 75

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?

(Andrew I've got your reference from Biju can you help out on this one)

[hemant_1]

Hello,

The best way is :merge the 5300s with 4300s, merge 5100s with 300Bs. Then disconnect the devices one path at a time and connect the devices to 5300s, like this you can disconnect all the devices from 4300 to 5300. do similarly in  case of 5100 and 300Bs .now you have all the devices on the new SWs.connect ISLs between 5100s and 5300s, once you ar econfirmed that all the devices are communicatiing with each other after checking the config file of the SWs, you take out the 4300s and 300Bs. check SAN migration guide for merging the SWs.do it while low I/o is there on the Fabrics.

This is an online migration