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Technical Specifications
devices. These procedures are applicable to any of a broad class of routine
maintenance tasks; indeed, they would apply to these devices in many scenarios
with any Fibre Channel switch in any addressing mode.
While this section is not comprehensive, it should give a SAN administrator the
information needed to plan and execute a successful core PID format update, and
also provide useful information for other SAN management tasks.
Recommended Approaches
To update to the new PID format in a non-production or non-critical environment,
the procedure can be very simple. Schedule downtime for all devices attached to
the SAN, and perform the offline update procedure below. This is the easiest
process, but the most disruptive to the environment.
The process of updating to the new PID format online in a production
environment is slightly more complex. It is broken down into two phases: the
evaluation phase and the update phase. At the end of the evaluation phase, all
information needed to safely update to the new PID format will be in hand, and an
update procedure will be created. Depending on the results of the evaluation phase
and the SAN's uptime requirements, either the online or offline update processes
will be used in the update phase.
Evaluation Phase
In this phase, the SAN will be evaluated to determine how each device driver
responds to the PID format change, and how the SAN's multi-pathing software
responds to a fabric service interruption.
Data Collection
In many sites, detailed documentation about the SAN is kept up-to-date. If so, it
may be possible to skip the Data Collection step. However, some sites will not
already have this information at hand. In these cases, it is necessary to perform a
site survey, collecting information on each device in the SAN. The purpose is to
find any devices which bind to PIDs, and find out how the multi-pathing software
will respond to the process. Learning this will have broad applicability:
PID-bound devices are not able to seamlessly perform in many routine
maintenance or failure scenarios, and improperly configured multi-pathing
software may cause downtime, rather than avoiding it.
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Core Switch 2/64 V4.1 Installation Guide
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