In This Chapter; Virtual Fabrics Overview - Brocade Communications Systems 53-1001763-02 Administrator's Manual

Managing Virtual Fabrics

In this chapter

Virtual Fabrics overview

Virtual Fabrics is an architecture to virtualize hardware boundaries. Traditionally, SAN design and
management is done at the granularity of a physical switch. The Virtual Fabrics feature allows SAN
design and management to be done at the granularity of a port.
Virtual Fabrics is a suite of related features that can be customized based on your needs. The
Virtual Fabrics suite consists of the following specific features:
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Virtual Fabrics overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
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Logical switch overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210
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Logical fabric overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214
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Management model for logical switches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
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Account management and Virtual Fabrics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
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Supported platforms for Virtual Fabrics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
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Limitations and restrictions of Virtual Fabrics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
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Enabling Virtual Fabrics mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
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Disabling Virtual Fabrics mode. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
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Configuring logical switches to use basic configuration values . . . . . . . . . 225
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Creating a logical switch or base switch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
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Executing a command in a different logical fabric context. . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
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Deleting a logical switch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
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Adding and removing ports on a logical switch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
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Displaying logical switch configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
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Changing the fabric ID of a logical switch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
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Changing a logical switch to a base switch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
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Configuring a logical switch to use XISLs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232
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Changing the context to a different logical fabric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233
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Creating a logical fabric using XISLs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
Logical switch
Logical fabric
Device sharing
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