Brocade Access Gateway Administrator's Guide Supporting Fabric OS v7.0.0 (53-1002156-01, April 2011)

Access Gateway Administrator’s Guide 41

53-1002156-01

Port Grouping policy

Setting the current MFNM mode timeout value

1. Connect to the switch and log in using an account assigned to the admin role.

2. Enter the ag --pgfnmtov command, followed by a value in seconds.

switch:admin> ag --pgfnmtov 100

This sets the timeout value to 100 seconds.

Port Grouping policy considerations

Following are the considerations for the Port Grouping policy:

• A port cannot be a member of more than one port group.

• The PG policy is enabled by default in Fabric OS v6.0 and later. A default port group “0” (PG0)

is created, which contains all ports on the AG.

• APC policy and PG policy are mutually exclusive. You cannot enable these policies at the same

time.

• If an N_Port is added to a port group or deleted from a port group and Automatic Login

Balancing mode is enabled or disabled for the port group, the N_Port maintains its original

failover or failback setting. If an N_Port is deleted from a port group, it automatically gets

added to port group 0.

• When specifying a preferred secondary N_Port for a port group, the N_Port must be from the

same group. If you specify an N_Port as a preferred secondary N_Port and it already belongs to

another port group, the operation fails. Therefore, it is recommended to form groups before

defining the preferred secondary path.

• If the PG policy is disabled while a switch in AG mode is online, all the defined port groups are

deleted, but the port mapping remains unchanged. Before disabling the PG policy, you should

save the configuration using the configUpload command in case you might need this

configuration again.

• If N_Ports connected to unrelated fabrics are grouped together, N_Port failover within a port

group can cause the F_Ports to connect to a different fabric. The F_Ports may lose connectivity

to the targets to which they were connected before the failover, thus causing I/O disruption, as

shown in Figure 9 on page 36. Ensure that the port group mode is set to MFNM mode (refer to

“Enabling MFNM mode” on page 40). This monitors the port group to detect connection to

multiple fabrics and disables failover of the N-ports in the port group. For more information on

MFNM, refer to “Managed Fabric Name Monitoring mode” on page 38.

Upgrade and downgrade considerations for the Port Grouping policy

Downgrading to Fabric OS v6.4.0 or earlier is supported.

Note the following considerations when upgrading to Fabric OS v7.0.0:

• When upgrading to Fabric OS v7.0.0 from v6.4.0, the PG policy that was enforced in Fabric OS

v6.4.0 continues to be enforced in Fabric OS v7.0.0 and the port groups are retained. You

should save the configuration file using the configUpload command in case you might need

this configuration again.

• If you upgrade to Fabric OS v7.0.0 from Fabric OS v5.3.0 to 6.0 or later, you will not see any

change in device behavior where the Port Grouping policy is enabled by default.