How do I connect McData to an existing Brocade fabric

Man, you are quick !

Don't you ever sleep ?

i have McData ED-140M connected to Brocade 4024. On McData we had to set operating mode to "Open Fabric 1.0" and on Brocade we had to set interop mode 3. As you know setting interop mode requires "switchdisable" and if am not mistaken reboot as well, i could be wrong on the reboot though.  My Brocade is on FOS 6.2.1b and McData on 9.08

Just woke up

Loose switch config ? That sounds creepy...... Dynamox: will we loose zoning, zonesets, aliases when we switch to interop 3 ?

that i do not know. McData are my core switches and whenever i connected brocades to this fabric they were brand new switches. That was something else you had to consider, take a look at this document. It's kind of old but domain id numbering is still the same. This document mentions interop mode 1, which was true for FOS 5.x ..for FOS 6.x interop mode should be 3

http://www.computeranddata.com/doc/vendors/mcdata/mcdata_brocade_merging_fabrics.pdf

After reading the procedure on how to change the operating mode on the brocade to interop 3 it states the following:

The switch effective configuration will be lost.

Does this mean that I will lose all zoning settings etc.?

I was also wondering if this will be sufficient to get it working. Don't we need to change the domain ID's? I read somewhere that we should avoid duplicate ID's.

I assume that we also need to configure the ports as E-Ports?

Thanks in advance,

Will

Nice nickname ! Welcome to the forums !!

About the E-ports: of course. When connecting 2 switches together, both ISL ports need to be set to E.

About the domain id's: a merge can only take place when the domain ids in the fabric are unique on each switch.

Loose switch config ? That sounds creepy...... Dynamox: will we loose zoning, zonesets, aliases when we switch to interop 3 ?

I've never used Interop mode 3, but we have most of our Brocade switches in Interop mode 2 connected to McData native fabrics. Switching to mode 2 definitely clears the config on the switch, so I suspect mode 3 would do the same.

One of the issues with using the interop modes is the reduction in functionality on the switch. I don't have the chart handy, but you should be able to find the details of what features you will lose on both the McData and Brocade switches by putting them in Interop mode 3/Open Fabric Mode.

If you have to take a disruption any way, you should probably consider running the McData switches in Native mode and the Brocades in Interop Mode 2. You will get full functionality on the McDatas and more functionality on the Brocades in mode 2 than in mode 3. It's worth checking out (since this isn't going to happen disruptively without you implementing some kind of SAN routing - if then even)

The problem is that the Brocade fabrics are the production ones and the McData's are the "new" switches, so this has quite an impact !

Understood, but I'm not sure there is any way you can get the McData's integrated without taking some kind of outage (at least at a fabric level). If all your hosts are connected through two separate fabrics you could still do the whole job without taking the hosts down.

It boils down to this though:

• Brocades are currently in native mode
  
  
• You can't switch modes non-disruptively
  
  
• You can't ISL the McDatas in to a Native Brocade fabric
  
  

That really only leaves you two options for using the switches together:

• Brocades in Interop mode 3 and McDatas in Open Fabric mode
  
  
• Brocades in Interop mode 2 and McDatas in McData Native mode
  
  

Either way you are going to take a disruption on the Brocades. The biggest factor in this for me is the fact that having at least my McDatas running native give's me a bit more functionality that running both in Open Interop. But you have to decide for this specific situation what provides the most value.

Thank you for your thought about this. I'm sure the customer can now decide how to approach this project now.

Another option could be to use 1 HBA to a Brocade switch and the other to McData or buy a few extra HBA's.

There is a doc that states all zoning in a McData/Brocade interop fabric must be done through the Mcdata switches.

You may lose all zoning on the Brocade switches if you don't migrate the config off of the Brocade switch that is the lowest domain

number. There used to be a doc on the Brocade website that explains hopw to connect the 2 switches in interop mde and preserve

the Brocade zoning

Once you put a Brocade switch into interop mode the Domain ID is automaticcaly set to 96. This can cause issues with Unix hosts

that use the switch IDs as part of the kun number.

Exactly what kind of switches and firmwares are we talking about here ?

Brocade 200E or something, McData 4500 or something ?

Welcome to the Forums soupy (and I won't ask about the name :-) )

Can you confirm that the document referring to zoning through the McData switches is still current? I know there was a point in time when this was true but I believe those issues have been resolved. We do some of our zoning through McData and some through the Brocades. Personally I much prefer the Brocade interface for zoning, and we have never experienced any issues with that.

The other thing I would caution on is the concern over the changing Domain ID. If I remember correctly this only affects AIX (and HP-UX) if the storage array port is on the switch that changes Domain ID. The host end of the link shouldn't be a problem. Also, this doesn't always affect AIX. There are features that can be (and are recommended by IBM to be) turned on allowing it to dynamically recognize and adjust to storage endpoint changes.

If you can find the docs regarding changing modes on the Brocades without losing zoning I would love to see them. We are going to have to flip some of our mixed fabrics to Brocade native mode as we migrate off the McDatas over the next year or two and this would be very helpful in reducing the impact.

Hello,

I would recommend reviewing the latest version of the EMC Topology Guide and EMC Support Matrix to see what has been tested an verified to work.   The Topology guide contains examples of inteorp configurations that work and best practices to follow with them.  Anything else stated in other documentation may be out of date.

Thank you.