Brocade Fabric OS v6.4.3f Release Notes v1.0

Fabric OS v6.4.3f Release Notes v1.0 Page 22 of 149
Other Important Notes and Recommendations
Management Server Platform Capability support changes in FOS v6.4
FOS v6.4 no longer automatically enables the Management Server (MS) Platform capability when a switch
attempts to join a fabric that has these services enabled. This prevents a FOS v6.4 switch from joining such a
fabric, and ISL will be disabled with a RAS log message. To allow a FOS v6.4 switch to join such fabrics
msPlMgmtActivate command should be used to enable the Management Server platform services explicitly.
FCIP, FCIP Trunking and High Bandwidth (Brocade 7800 and FX8-24)
 IPsec is not supported on XGE0 of FX8-24 blade starting with FOS v6.4. IPsec is supported on XGE1
and GE0 through GE9.
 IPsec is supported on FCIP tunnels that use only IPV4 connections.
 FICON networks with FCIP tunnels do not support DPS (aptpolicy 3) configurations. This applies to both
emulating and non-emulating FCIP tunnels.
 The maximum supported MTU size for the Brocade 7800/FX8-24 is 1500.
 FCIP connections are supported only between the Brocade 7800/FX8-24 and another 7800/FX8-24.
FCIP tunnels are not supported between the 7800/FX8-24 and the previous generation Brocade
7500/FR4-18i platforms.
 When multiple FCIP tunnels are present on a switch and additional circuits (and the network
bandwidth provided by those circuits) are added to an already active tunnel, there may be a short
period of time where some frame loss can occur due to the process to re-fresh the internal FC frame
routing tables in the switch. Therefore, additional circuits should only be added during low I/O periods
utilizing the FCIP Tunnel being modified. In addition, if the circuit operation (addition/deletion) to the
tunnel increases/decreases the total tunnel bandwidth, an FCIP Tunnel (VE port) disable/enable
sequence should be performed after the addition/deletion of the circuit. This will allow the switch to
adjust the internal routes to utilize the new bandwidth fully.
 Switching modes between 10G and 1G is disruptive for FCIP traffic.
 Keep alive timeout (milliseconds) - Valid range is 500ms to 7,200,000ms (inclusive). FOS
default value is 10000ms (10 seconds). If FICON is configured the recommended value is
1000 ms (1 second), otherwise the recommended value is the default of 10 seconds. For
impairment networks with 100ms latency and 0.5% packet loss, keep-alive time out should
be configured as 30seconds. If the local and remote circuit configurations’ Keep Alive
Timeout values do not match, the tunnel will use the lower of the two configured values.
 In order to perform the following operations it is necessary to delete the FCIP configuration on
the affected ports first:
o Switching modes between 1G/10G/Dual.
o Moving VE/GE port between logical switches.
 ARL (Adaptive Rate Limiting) is not supported on 10G tunnels.
 “Inband Management” is not supported on the Brocade 7800.
 FOS v6.4 only supports up to four 1 Gig Circuits per VE/FCIP Tunnel for the 1 gig interfaces. A
VE/FCIP Tunnel created over the 10 Gig Interfaces will be limited to 10 circuits created using
IPIFs on the same 10 GbE port (and no more than 1G per circuit).As a recommended best
practice, the VE tunnel shouldn’t be over-subscribed (e.g. 8G FC traffic over 500Mbps tunnel).
General guidelines are 2:1 subscription without compression and 4:1 with compression.
 Non-disruptive firmware activation will disrupt I/O traffic on FCIP links.