Brocade Fabric Manager Administrator's Guide v6.1.0 (53-10000610-02, June 2008)

Fabric Manager Administrator’s Guide 59
53-10000610-02
Chapter
4
Discovering and Customizing Fabrics
In this chapter
This chapter provides information about discovering fabrics with Fabric Manager (including running
subnet scans), renaming and deleting fabrics, customizing and using the information provided in
the Fabric Manager views, and synchronizing the data and time across an entire fabric. See the
following topics for the steps required to accomplish the specific Fabric Management tasks:
•Fabric Discovery. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
•Simultaneous login to multiple switches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
•Fabric monitoring. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
•Seed switch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
•Fabric removal from Fabric Manager . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
•Fabric component renaming. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
•Work with switch groups and port groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Fabric Discovery
You must discover a fabric before you can administer it with Fabric Manager. You can discover a
fabric in two ways:
When you discover a fabric, Fabric Manager checks to confirm that the seed switch is running the
latest Fabric OS version in the fabric, and if it is not, Fabric Manager prompts you to select a new
seed switch.
For a secure fabric, the seed switch must be the primary FCS. If you use a non-primary FCS to
discover the fabric, Fabric Manager displays an error and will not allow the discovery to proceed. If
Fabric Manager has already discovered the fabric, but afterward you create the FCS policy and the
seed switch is not a primary FCS, an alert is generated during the next poll.
Fabric Manager cannot discover a fabric that is in the process of actively configuring to form a
fabric. Wait until the fabric is formed and stable, then re-attempt the fabric discovery.
After fabric discovery successfully completes, the Fabric Manager client that initiated the discovery
is updated to display the newly discovered fabric. Other Fabric Manager clients receive a message
dialog that one or more fabrics are available for monitoring. If you receive this message, you can
choose to ignore it or to begin monitoring the newly discovered fabrics. See “Fabric monitoring” on
page 65 for instructions.
Discover fabric Use this option if you want to discover a single fabric and you know the IP
address or DNS name of the seed switch.
Subnet Scan Use this option if you want to discover multiple fabrics in the same subnet, or if
you do not know the exact IP address of the seed switch.