Deployment Guide

Once you activate a Flow Generator flow, the flow will stay active until you deactivate the flow. The
flow stays active even though the SID and DID SIM-ports are offline. As soon as SID and DID SIM-
ports are online, traffic will start.
Flow Generator setup
Flow Generator offers several flow control options that you can configure, including the ability to
specify both the frame size and the frame payload pattern. Header parameters and other control
parameters can also be added as part of the definition. The 0XID value for frames cannot be user-
specified.
Flow Generator generates and receives traffic only from simulated ingress and egress ports (SIM
ports) which emulate device entries in the Name Server database, so that they are treated as real
devices and can be used to evaluate various switch and fabric operations such as QoS and Traffic
Isolation. For more information on working with SIM ports, refer to SIM port attributes and
configuration on page 71.
Flow Generator flows are defined using a combination of the source device (srcdev), destination
device (dstdev), ingress port (ingrport), and egress port (egrport) parameters. All of these must be SIM
ports. The source device is the origination point of the test traffic. The destination device is the
destination of the test traffic; for Flow Generator flows it may be remote from the switch. The port that
transmits the simulation traffic must be a 16 Gbps-capable Fibre Channel port. The port that receives
the simulated traffic can be either an 8 Gbps- or a 16 Gbps-capable Fibre Channel port. The following
figure illustrates this concept.
FIGURE 10 A Flow Generator flow structure
Predefined Flow Generator flows
Predefined flows are system-defined flows that support most common testing scenarios. These flows
are automatically created and defined based on your network structure as part of the upgrade to
Fabric OS 7.3.0. These flows use the port ID and device ID modes and other control parameters
configured for Flow Generator.
With the release of Fabric OS 7.3.0, there is one predefined flow. The name of this flow is
sys_gen_all_simports. In this flow, traffic is generated from each SIM port on a switch to all the other
SIM ports configured on that switch. This allows you to easily stress-test the hardware, ASIC path,
backplanes, front-end, switch, and fabric operations. The stress-testing operation is handled in
iterations. At each iteration, all SIM ports generate traffic to a set of destination ports, determined by
their order in the physical chip interleave, so that all the chips are tested at the beginning of the test.
Every SIM port will generate traffic to four destinations through 39 Virtual Channels, but it will not
generate traffic to itself.
You can configure this flow to run on all the ports on the switch, or on a specific slot, port range, or list
of ports.
Flow Generator setup
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