How to make zones on working switches without any disrupt ?

[Piotr_Salwerowicz]

Hi

I have hsv 110 and 2 standalone switches slkwrm 300, both without zones, both have fabos 6.2.1, both are principal, without isl. In this moment they aren't connected eachother.

Now i have to make 3 or more zones on both switches. What i should do to make this without any brake in network?

I should connect eachother both switches ? When i prepare zone config properly and i type apply there will be some brake, disrupt ?

thank You for any advice

regards
Peter

[Terri Harris · Accepted solution]

You can connect the 2 Brocade switches without disrupting anything in the SAN fabric. First make sure that both switches do not have the same domain id. If they do, change one by running the CONFIGURE command.
I recommend getting the ISL created first.

The Brocade FOS will then make one switch the principal and one the subordinate. The principal will be the switch with the lowest numbered switch node WWN address.

Once this is done, use only the principal to setup your zoning on both switches. If you configure zoning on each switch, the zoning configuration must be identical for the ISL connection to work. So it is much easier and best practice to create and maintain zoning on the one principal switch.

You create zones and add members and verify the zoning without changing the default where everything can access everything else. It is not until you do the last step with the command CFGENABLE that it actually takes effect.

Disruption to traffic? Brocade says there is none unless there are changes to traffic isolation zones, TI zones. If you have no existing config, this is not an issue.

[Piotr_Salwerowicz]

Thank you for info

I think about shutdown database in time when i'll apply zones because i read in san_design_guide on page 408 that is strongly recomended to shutdown any i/o activity. Someone has some experience with tahat?

I have second question: Let say we have 2 switches connected together, there is principial and subordinate and we add new switch with lower wwn than principial, what will happend ? principial will stay or new one switch will be principial ?

regards
Peter

[Uwe Zessin]

Many, many years ago I had one server (Tru64 Unix OS) crashing during a zoning change - due to a bug in the device driver. I have not seen other problems since then - well, except when I made a zoning error ;-)