Implications of replacing switch brocade

[Carlos F. Baladrón]

I have hp-ux servers were connected to SAN (EMC DMX) with 2 switch (redundancy)
What are the implications of replacing one of brocade fibre channel switch with software (wwn) zones with another ??
I'd like to know the detailed procedure for replacing the switch in a HP-UX 11i environment with pv link Can I:
save config
replace switch
load config
and continue working?? change HW path ?

[Steven E. Protter]

Almost all of this work needs to be done on the switch.

Since you are not changing out fiber cards, the WWN(World Wide Name) Information there is no need to change any configuration on the HP-9000 server.

The process on the switch must include preserving the World Wide Name and disk configuration and making sure its migrated to the new switch properly. The HP-9000 server needs to be down during the upgrade.

So long as the disk is configured and presented the same way, the device driver infor for lvm and pvlink should not need to change.

In theory.

SEP

[Steven E. Protter]

Since you are only replacing one switch, you don't need to shut down the server.

To avoid extra hardware paths and such being created during the process I personally would down the server.

SEP

[Carlos F. Baladrón]

we have a redundant switch configuration all the LUNs have two path; one using the switch to be replaced and another using other switch which will not be changed.
In this case, we can leave the HPUX servers up, can't we ?

[Dave Hutton]

We went from two 16 port brocade switches to two 32 port brocade switches.

There was some prep work that HP came out and configured before the day that we swapped them out. I don't know exactly what they had to do, but they had to make the new brocades look like the old ones so the wwn wouldn't change.

I seem to remember that we brought all the servers down that were attached to the old 16 port switches.

We then went server by server plugging the hba into the switch (the same port number, so old port #1 went to new port #1), checked to see if the disks were there with the same address. And then would plug in the alternate (pvlink) to make sure that looked fine.

It really went flawlessly. So it is doable and if done right your servers won't notice a difference.

[Uwe Zessin]

Make sure that the Domain-ID is the same on the new switch, because it (besides the port number) is part of the HP-UX hardware path, too. It should not be a problem because this information is saved in the configuration.

I suggest that you not plug in any servers or storage before you have restored the configuration and made sure that the zoning is active on the new switch.

[Gerhard Roets]

Document the logical switch config.
Zones, Quickloop, Licenses, Host to port etc etc. It would also be good to print the current config.

I know its obvious, but in the long run that is gonna save you a load of shlep. This is only part of the solution though.