Brocade Access Gateway Administrator's Guide - Supporting Fabric OS v5.2.1 (53-1000430-01)

Access Gateway Administrator’s Guide 1-5

Publication Number: 53-1000430-01

Port initialization

To ensure that all hosts are brought online when Brocade Access Gateway starts up, the ports are

initialized in the following manner:

1. All N_Ports are initialized. During N_Port initialization all the F_Ports are disabled (kept

OFFLINE).

The ports are enabled or disabled as follows:

• Enabled (online) if the port receives a fabric login event and is connected to an F_Port of an

edge switch that supports NPIV (N_Port ID virtualization).

• Disabled (offline) if the port is not connected to a fabric or is connected to a fabric port that

does not support NPIV.

2. All F_Ports mapped to online N_Ports are enabled. F_Ports that are inactive or that have no hosts

are disabled.

3. F_Ports mapped to an offline N_Port with the failover policy enabled fail over to an online N_Port.

4. The host logs in to the fabric as follows:

a. The host sends a FLOGI (fabric login) request.

b. Access Gateway proxies the request using FDISC primitive to the fabric with the same

parameters as the host.

c. The fabric processes the request and sends an FDISC response.

d. Access Gateway proxies the response to the host using the same parameters as the fabric.

e. The host receives the response from the fabric.

After ports are initialized, Access Gateway becomes logically transparent to the host and the

fabric, as shown in Figure 1-4.

Figure 1-4 Host log in request