Arrays from all vendors have significant troubleshooting capabilities but in most cases these are scambled in the most obscure way you can imagine. You need special tools to be able to have a look at the log-dumps that come out of these systems. The nice part is that they contain a wealth of information including what is going on at the FC layer.
In the storage world there mainly have been two environments : 1 FCP and 2. SBCC which stands for Fibre Channel – Protocol and Single Byte Command Code Set.
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If you’ve been laying low during Christmas last year and have overlooked that Brocade announced its first to market with “Gen 6” (32G) hardware and FOS code 8, you’re forgiven. FOS 8 was mainly released to support the new G620 hardware but a lot of functions and features did either not work or were not supported yet. FOS 8 also dropped support for a lot of hardware which is a good thing IMHO. 8G equipment like the DCX4S, DCX as well as the single unit switches like the 5100 and 5300 were dropped.
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There are occasions where you need to remove an entire zoning configuration from a switch. One of them is if you need to add a switch to an existing fabric and it still has a configuration in it. If these two conflict the switch will simply segment and the ISL’s get disabled. Another reason might be in case of configuration conflicts where and administrator had made zone changes whilst one switch was not participating in the fabric. Depending on how the switch is set up and the actual fabric state you need to follow different procedures.
In the IT world a panic is most often related to a operating systems kernel to run out of resources or some unknown state where it cannot recover and stops. Depending on the configuration it might dump its memory contents to a file or a remote system. This allows developers to check this file and look for the reason why it happened.
A fibre-channel switch running Linux as OS is no different but the consequences can be far more severe.
Having to miss last years edition I was fortunate enough to be able to attend this years CiscoLive! conference in my hometown Melbourne again. Venue was excellent as usual. MCEC provides perfect facilities and is in the heart of the city so no dramas here.
The opening keynote already showed to direction where Cisco has steered the ship. Datacentre agility to cope with the ever increasing demand for business flexibility and be able to adapt quickly to changes in market conditions.
Cisco is acknowledging that it needs to adjust their products and services portfolio in such a way business can still use its entire catalog but by opening up the methodologies in which these products are used it gives more control and choice to the people who have to design, implement and operate these infrastructures. This way they don’t need to align their internal processes to the ever more diverse product-set but the other way around.
One example is NX-OS. The operating system running the core of Cisco’s networking products. With the introduction of NX-OS 7 on the Nexus 7000 and the new 9000, the operating system has “rebranded” itself to “Open NX-OS”. This doesn’t mean Cisco has put the source on Github but it gives a more accessible method of interacting with the switches, or any other supported platform for that matter. By providing a rich REST-full API it’s easy to create programs, tools and scripts which can automate deployment and day-to-day operations.
Evidence of this is the fact that Cisco had set up an entire track for developers in the form of a, so called “DevNet zone”. An area at the conference where developers, or anyone interested, could learn more about developing scripts and tools to better interact with the wide portfolio Cisco has. This was not only restricted to the conference. Cisco has ramped up a large online devnet area including a impressive sandbox where developers can test and validate their programs towards the majority of Cisco technology. As you may have seen this is not new and the methodology is more or less adopted from the OpenSource communities around the worlds where this has been created. Distributed development of software by coding, peer review, testing, building and deploying has been done for over two decades and even long before that in the educational institutions.
A lot of Cisco teams and individuals contribute in the form of code, documentation, examples and a myriad of hints and tips to get you started.
Obviously Cisco is no philanthropic organization so don’t expect any non-cisco technologies to be covered. Even when you think you see Cisco’s involvement in a non-cisco product or code, like for example OpenStack, a lot of code is contributed in the form of Cisco enablement in that product. No problem here, all vendors do that and it increases the usability and experience of the overall product.
I must applaud Cisco for embracing the way IT is used these days and give customers more control in the way they want to use Cisco products. This really is the way forward and all vendors should adopt this methodology and provide resources in the form of knowledge, product resources and people. Other companies like EMC with {code} and IBM’s Developerworks provide a similar experience
CiscoLive! 2016 covered a lot more topics like security, wireless, communications etc. etc.
Another great feat was I got to see a few friend again. Dr J Metz finally made it to Australia and David Jansen who’s sessions I always enjoy for its pragmatic approach and technical depth. Great to see you guys again.
All in all another excellent conference where I learned a lot and provide me with a significant bag of information to keep me busy for another year.
Thanks Cisco.
One of the most complex ways of implementing long distance connectivity is using CWDM or DWDM extension equipment. Reason being is that the technology is often fairly complex and diagnostics in case of troubleshooting is most often done on a layer 1 level which means you need to have extensive knowledge of not only the way Fibre-Channel operates on a FC-PI (Physical Interface) but also how it aligns to the standards described by the ITU.
If there is one thing I would consider “the” blunder of FOS engineering it has to be Traffic Isolation zoning. I mean, creating such an administrative nightmare with obscure directions causing confusion and nasty pitfalls when one thing goes wrong is in many occasions a recipe for disaster.
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This subject will be divided in two sections.
In FOS 7 the concept of frame-monitoring was introduced on Condor2 and Condor3 ASICs. This allowed an administrator to create a frame template based on the FC frameheader (see here) and obtain statistics on these frames. Flow Vision is somewhat progressing on this technology and has been extended significantly. Flow Vision is a 3 way solution which requires a switch capable of providing the functionality, software licensed to be able to configure and capture flows and a tool to collect and interpret these flows. All Condor 3 based switches (16G), FOS 7.4 and up, and Brocade Network Advisor 12.4.x are needed to be able to fully utilise the base flow-vision functionality. (The Brocade AMP platform is an extension but will be discussed later.)