Fabric OS Administrator's Guide v7.0.0 (53-1002148-02, June 2011)

282 Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide

53-1002148-02

Supported configurations for Traffic Isolation Zoning

• Each TI zone is interpreted by each switch and each switch considers only the routing required

for its local ports. No consideration is given to the overall topology and to whether the TI zones

accurately provide dedicated paths through the whole fabric.

For example, in Figure 46, the TI zone was configured incorrectly and E_Port “3,9” was

erroneously omitted from the zone. The domain 3 switch assumes that traffic coming from

E_Port 9 is not part of the TI zone and so that traffic is routed to E_Port 11 instead of E_Port

12, if failover is enabled. If failover is disabled, the route is broken and traffic stops.

FIGURE 46 TI zone misconfiguration

Supported configurations for Traffic Isolation Zoning

Note the following configuration rules for TI zones:

• Ports in a TI zone must belong to switches that run Fabric OS v6.0.0 or later. For TI over FCR

zones, all switches and FC routers in both edge and backbone fabrics must be running Fabric

OS v6.1.0 or later.

• For the FC8-64 blade in the Brocade DCX and DCX 8510-8, ports 48–63 can be in a TI zone

only if all switches in that TI zone are running Fabric OS v6.4.0 or later. Ports 48–63 can still be

in a failover path for TI traffic.

The Brocade DCX-4S and DCX 8510-4 do not have this limitation.

• VE_Ports are supported in TI zones.

• TI Zoning is not supported in fabrics with switches running firmware versions earlier than

Fabric OS v6.0.0. However, the existence of a TI zone in such a fabric is backward-compatible

and does not disrupt fabric operation in switches running earlier firmware versions.

TI over FCR is not backward compatible with Fabric OS v6.0.x or earlier. The -1 in the

domain,index entries causes issues to legacy switches in a zone merge. Firmware downgrade

is prevented if TI over FCR zones exist.

= Dedicated path

= Ports in the TI zone

Domain 1 Domain 3

Domain 4