Clearing Brocade port error counters

Quick cut-n-paste commands to clear all the ports on Brocade Switches.

Enableing Access Gateway (NPIV) on Brocade

Brocade’s flavor of NPIV is called Access Gateway. It’s a way to dumb down the switch and make it more of a pass-through device. When AG is enabled, the switch makes much less routing or switching decisions, and passess all the traffic to an upstream switch. The upstream switch ports switch to a F ports, and the “egress” ports on the NPIV switch become N ports.

Configuring FabricWatch

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DRAFT

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First, setup your Email relay system:

Checking Brocade LD BB Credits

If you’re seeing excessive “Time BB Credits Zero” in the gui, or tim_txcrd_z in portstatsshow, you may want to bump up the buffer credits.

SeriesP HBA not logging into the fabric

On one box, I had a HBA that would NOT do a fabric login, this is what we had to do to get it to login:

1. Unplug the fibre from the HBA
2. Cycle the LPAR
3. Boot it into SMS
4. Attach the fibre to the HBA
5. Run a scan for hard disks via SMS (5-Boot options, 1-select boot device, 5-Hard drives, 9-Scan)

Tada… your HBA should light up and log in

Default Brocade passwords

Here are the default passwords I have for Brocade switches. All the passwords should be changed with the root account before merging into the fabric:

root fibranne
root password
admin password

FastT Segment Size Tuning

When tuning for performance, the segment size can make a noticeable difference. The segment size is the size of each transaction in kilobytes between the disk controllers and each physical disk. This can be changed under Logical Drive -> Change -> Segment Size.

FastT Network Setup

The procedure to configure the network ports on the FAStT controller is poorly described in the FAStT Storage Manager Installation and Support Guide, but we worked this out. Some FastT’s have a slightly different process to setup the network, but they’re all very similar.

FastT Hot Spares

The FastT has a global pool of hot spare disks, hot spares do not need to be in the same drawer as the failing disk. It will first look for any hot spares defined in the same drawer as the failed drive, then it looks at the last hot spares defined.

FastT Cache Block Size Tuning

The cache block size is the size of each memory block used for caching, the only two options are 4k and 16k. The cache block size should be set to the size of the average work unit, or less. Never exceed the size of the average work unit. For instance, if you are using Oracle with an 8k segment size, you should use 4k. Using 16k will result in each cache block only bing half utilized. Using 4k will use two blocks, but they will both be filled. This can be changed under Storage Subsystem -> Change -> Cache Settings.