Change the principle switch in SAN Fabric for brocade

[owahid]

I have SAN Fabric which contain six san switches , two san sws exist in c7000 , two in onther c7000 , two are external rack mount .

the principl switch now is one of the san sw exist in one c7000 enclosure , we are going to remove this enclosure (which contain the principle san sw) from our data center .

My question : how to change the principle san switch to an external switch ? what is the impact on the production?

Thanks

[sbhat09 · Accepted solution]

Hello Owahid,

If you have redundant connections from other switches, you can remove/reboot/turn-off the principal SAN switch. One of the subordinate switches will assume the role of principal switch. That will not result in loss of any information.

All the switches in a fabric share the same set of information such as zoning table. They are designed to be redundant and to assume the principal switch role any time when the principal switch fails.

Regards,
Srinivas Bhat

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[sbhat09]

Hello Owahid,

Was that helpful? Please let me know if you need further assistance.

Regards,
Srinivas Bhat

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[Steven Clementi]

In addition to the previous response, and while you do not need to manually change the principal switch... keep in mind that the automatic process will select the lowest WWN for the remaining switches to be the principal and that could be one of the other blade enclosure switches (assuming there is no priority set)

If you want to force one of the external switches to always be the principal, you can lower the priority setting on the other switches, or increase it on the selected external switch so that whenever a fabric election takes place... that switch always wins if it is online.

Now... I have some concerns:

You state that you have a single(?) SAN Fabric with 6 switches, two (2) from each of the c-class enclosures and two (2) rack mount? or do you have two SAN Fabrics each with three (3) SAN Switches?

[owahid]

Many thanks for your support

It is just switches not fabrics

If I gave a san sw protirty 0 and another sw priority 1 whicjh one has the higher priority(mean which one will be the princople sw over other switches)

Waiting for your feedback

[owahid]

Can any one help?

[owahid]

Many thanks for your support

It is just switches not fabrics

If I gave a san sw protirty 0 and another sw priority 1 whicjh one has the higher priority(mean which one will be the princople sw over other switches)

[sbhat09]

Hi Owahid,

To Summarise how a switch assumes priority or principal role:
The default switch priority will be in the range of 0x3 - 0xFE. The switch with the lowest value of priority will gain the highest priority among others and assumes the role of principal switch.
If there are multiple switches with the same priority, the switch with the lowest value of switch WWN, will assume the role of principal switch.
You can also manually assign the role of principal switch to a specific switch.
The highest priority you can assign is 0x01 (Please note: 0x00 is a reserved value, this can't be assigned by users)

Command to see the existing priority : fabricprincipal --show
Command to manually change the priority of a specific switch or assign the role of principal switch : fabricprincipal --enable -priority 0x01

Direct answer to your query is:
The priority value looks like 0X3, 0xAB etc. Among them, 0x01 is the highest priority you can assign to make it principal switch.

Regards,
Srinivas Bhat

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[owahid]

Many thanks your support is very helpful, thanks again