Deployment Guide

Slot-based licensing
Slot-based licensing is used on the Brocade DCX and DCX 8510 Backbone families to support the
FX8-24 blade, and on the Brocade DCX 8510 Backbone family to support the 16-Gbps FC port blades
(FC16-24, FC16-48, and FC16-64). Slot-based licensing is used for the WAN Rate Upgrade 1 and
WAN Rate Upgrade 2 features on the Brocade 7840. Brocade 7840 has only a single slot that can be
licensed. License capacity is equal to the number of slots.
Slot-based licenses allow you to select the slots that the license will enable up to the capacity
purchased and to increase the capacity without disrupting slots that already have licensed features
running. Each slot-based license key is for a single feature.
Features utilizing slot-based licenses on the FX8-24 blade include:
• 10 Gigabit FCIP/Fibre Channel
• Advanced Extension
• Advanced FICON Acceleration
NOTE
The 10 GbE feature on the FX8-24 blade and the 10 Gbps FC feature on the 16-Gbps FC blades are
both enabled by the same 10 Gigabit FCIP/Fibre Channel license (10G license). This license can also
enable the 10 Gbps FC feature on a Brocade 6510 or 6520 switch as a chassis-based license.
Any unassigned slot-based license will be automatically assigned to applicable blades that are
detected in the chassis when the license is installed. If you have more applicable blades than available
license capacity, then you can manually assign or re-assign the licenses as necessary.
Once a license is assigned to a slot, whether it has been automatically assigned or manually assigned,
the assignment will remain until you manually reassign the license to another slot. This design allows
for various maintenance operations to occur without having the license move around to other slots.
The 10 Gigabit FCIP/Fibre Channel, Advanced Extension, Advanced FICON Acceleration, WAN Rate
Upgrade 1, and WAN Rate Upgrade 2 are slot-based features. After running the configDefault
command, you must explicitly remove and add these slot-based licenses for the license slot
assignment to be activated on a non-DCX platform.
On the Brocade 7840 switch, you can configure IP interfaces on 40-GbE ports (GE0 or GE1) only
when both WAN Rate Upgrade 1 and WAN Rate Upgrade 2 licenses are installed.
Upgrade and downgrade considerations
When a slot-based license is present on the switch, firmware downgrade to pre-Fabric OS v6.3.0 is
allowed, but the slot-based features that were licensed will not be functional.
On upgrade to Fabric OS v7.0.0 or later, any slot-based license that displayed the 10-GbE feature
name in the earlier release now appears as "10 Gigabit FCIP/Fibre Channel (FTR_10G) license."
Temporary licenses
A temporary license applies a "try-before-you-buy" approach to certain features so that you can
experience the feature and its capabilities prior to buying the license. Once you have installed the
Slot-based licensing
24 Fabric OS Software Licensing Guide
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