Switch Policies; Virtual Fabric Support; Port Persistence - Brocade Communications Systems A7533A - Brocade 4Gb SAN Switch Base Administrator's Manual

Switch policies

Switch policies are a series of rules that define specific health states for the overall switch. Fabric
OS interacts with Fabric Watch using these policies. Each rule defines the number of types of errors
that transitions the overall switch state into a state that is not healthy. For example, you can specify
a switch policy so that if a switch has two port failures, it is considered to be in a marginal state; if it
has four failures, it is in a down state.
You can define these rules for a number of classes and field replaceable units, including ports,
power supplies, and flash memory.
See
information on configuring switch policies.
See
the switch policy report.

Virtual Fabric support

Fabric Watch can monitor the switch health on eight logical switches. You can configure thresholds
and alarms for ports that belong to a particular logical switch. Each logical switch has its own
Fabric Watch configuration and triggers alarms based on its local configuration.
Fabric Watch supports port movement from one logical switch to another. Whenever a port is
moved, thresholds associated with the port are deleted from the logical switch the port was moved
from, and created for the logical switch to where the port is moved.
A logical interswitch link (LISL) is the logical portion of the physical connection that joins base
switches. You can enable or disable port thresholds and create thresholds for state changes on
LISLs, but Fabric Watch does not support other threshold areas such as link loss or signal loss for
LISLs as it does for normal E_Ports. See
changes that are allowed on a LISL.
NOTE
Link reset errors are not applicable to LISL ports.

Port persistence

The data collected in port monitoring can vary a great deal over short time periods. Therefore, the
port can become a source of frequent event messages (the data can exceed the threshold range
and return to a value within the threshold range).
Fabric Watch uses port persistence for a port event that requires the transition of the port into a
marginal status. Fabric Watch does not record any event until the event persists for a length of time
equal to the port persistence time. If the port returns to normal boundaries before the port
persistence time elapses, Fabric Watch does not record any event.
To set the port persistence time, refer to
Fabric Watch Administrator's Guide
53-1001188-01
"Switch status policy configuration"
Chapter 9, "Fabric Watch Reports"
in Chapter 8, "Fabric Watch Configurations"
for information on viewing the current switch policies using
"Port class areas" on page 15, for a complete list of state
"Setting the port persistence time"
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Switch policies

for
on page 70.
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