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

430 Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide

53-1002148-02

Supported configurations for trunking

• There must be a direct connection between participating switches.

• Trunking cannot be done if ports are in ISL R_RDY mode. (You can disable this mode using the

portCfgIslMode command.)

• Trunking is supported only on FC ports. Virtual FC ports (VE_ or VEX_Ports) do not support

trunking.

Supported configurations for trunking

• Trunk links can be 2 Gbps, 4 Gbps, 8 Gbps, 10 Gbps, or 16 Gbps depending on the Brocade

platform.

• The maximum number of ports per trunk and trunks per switch depends on the Brocade

platform.

• You can have up to eight ports in one trunk group to create high performance ISL trunks

between switches with up to 128 Gbps (based on 16 Gbps port speed).

• If in-flight encryption/compression is enabled, you can have a maximum of only two ports per

trunk.

• An E_Port or EX_Port trunk can be up to eight ports wide. All the ports must be adjacent to

each other using the clearly marked groups on the front of the product.

Trunks operate best when the cable length of each trunked link is roughly equal to the others in the

trunk. For optimal performance, no more than 30 meters difference is recommended. Trunks are

compatible with both short wavelength (SWL) and long wavelength (LWL) fiber optic cables and

transceivers.

Trunking is performed based on the Quality of Service (QoS) configuration on the master and the

slave ports. That is, in a given trunk group, if there are some ports with QoS enabled and some with

QoS disabled, they form two different trunks, one with QoS enabled and the other with QoS

disabled. For more information on QoS, refer to “QoS zones” on page 418.

High availability support for trunking

Trunking is a High Availability (HA) supported feature. The HA protocol for trunking is as follows:

• If trunking is disabled prior to the HA failover, it remains disabled after the HA failover.

• If trunking is enabled prior to the HA failover, it remains enabled after the HA failover.

Supported platforms for trunking

Trunking is supported on the FC ports of all Brocade platforms and blades supported in Fabric OS

v7.0.0.

EX_Port trunking is supported only on those platforms that support EX_Ports. See “Supported

platforms for Fibre Channel routing” on page 462 for more information.