Technical data

12-4 Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide
Publication Number: 53-0000518-09
Initializing Trunking on Ports
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For trunking groups over which traffic is likely to increase as business requirements grow, consider
leaving one or two ports in the group available for future nondisruptive addition of bandwidth.
• Consider creating redundant trunking groups where additional ports are available or paths are
particularly critical.
This helps to protect against oversubscription of trunking groups, multiple ISL failures in the same
group, and the rare occurrence of an ASIC failure.
• To provide the highest level of reliability, deploy trunking groups in redundant fabrics to further
ensure ISL failures do not disrupt business operations.
Initializing Trunking on Ports
After you unlock the ISL Trunking license, you must reinitialize the ports being used for ISLs so that
they recognize that trunking is enabled. This procedure only needs to be performed one time.
To reinitialize the ports, you can either disable and then reenable the switch, or disable and then
reenable the affected ports.
To disable and reenable the switch
1. Connect to the switch and log in as admin.
2. Enter the switchDisable command.
3. Enter the switchEnable command.
To disable and reenable ports
1. Connect to the switch and log in as admin.
2. Enter the portDisable command. The format is:
portDisable [slot/]port
Slot is the slot number (SilkWorm 12000 and 24000 directors only) and port is the port number of
the port you want to disable.
3. Enter the portEnable command.The format is:
portEnable [slot/]port
Slot is the slot number (SilkWorm 12000, 24000, and 48000 directors only) and port is the port
number of the port you want to enable.
Monitoring Traffic
To implement ISL Trunking effectively, you must monitor fabric traffic to identify congested paths or to
identify frequently dropped links. While monitoring changes in traffic patterns, you can adjust the fabric
design accordingly, such as by adding, removing, or reconfiguring ISLs and trunking groups in
problem areas.
There are three methods of monitoring fabric traffic: