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Active Fabric Features
Active Fabric Resiliency
Active fabric provides link and node resiliency, as well as the ability to converge at comparable time with
legacy networks. Active fabric provides more robust link and switch failure resiliency when compared
with legacy networks.
Link Resiliency
If a link goes down in the active fabric physical network, the controller is notified of the port status
change by the switches in the fabric. The controller receives the port status notification and handles the
link down event. Link failures are handled differently depending on if the unavailable link is for an edge
port between switches managed by the controller (internal link) or if the unavailable link is for an edge
port connected to a server or legacy switch (external link). The software updates the network topology
with the port status change. The type of technology used to manage the switch group determines how
the link failure is managed.
The controller configures the following:
• Forwarding database (FDB) entries
• VLAN hardware table
• VLT blocking
• Ingress port blocking (for loop prevention)
Switch Resiliency
The controller configures the hardware tables for the FDB entries, VLAN, VLT blocking, and ingress port
blocking for data traffic loop prevention. If a switch in the fabric is unavailable, the controller identifies the
unavailable switch through the transmission control protocol (TCP) connection failure. The software uses
OF messages to notify the rest of the active fabric that the switch is unavailable. The software disables all
links from and to the switch and notifies the other fabric entities of the link state change. If the switch is
at the edge of the switch group, the neighbor switch group’s interface is also disabled. After the software
notifies all fabric entities of the change, the software removes the unavailable switch from the fabric
topology.
Packet Forwarding
The controller manages the switches within its domain using OF, which is enabled on each switch in the
fabric connected to the controller. You must configure each switch using the controller information.
Enable OF on all individual ports so that the OF agent running on the switch can inform the controller
about the active ports available for OF negotiation.
Active Fabric Features
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