Device load balancing policy, Enabling the device load balancing policy, Policy – Brocade Access Gateway Administrator's Guide (Supporting Fabric OS v7.3.0) User Manual
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APC policy and PG policy are mutually exclusive. You cannot enable these policies at the same
time.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
on page 53. Ensure that the port group mode is set to MFNM
mode (refer to
on page 57). 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
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 7.1.0:
•
When upgrading to Fabric OS v7.1.0 from v6.4.0, the PG policy that was enforced in Fabric OS
v6.4.0 continues to be enforced in Fabric OS v7.1.0 and the port groups are retained. You should
save the configuration file using the configUpload command in case you might need this
configuration again.
•
Upgrade to Fabric OS v7.1.0 from Fabric OS prior to v6.4.0 is not supported.
Device Load Balancing policy
When the Device Load Balancing policy is enabled, devices mapped to a port group always log in to
the least-loaded N_Port in that port group. This helps to distribute the login load on each of the
N_Ports. This policy is intended for use in conjunction with device mapping. It provides an automatic
approach to mapping devices to the least-loaded N_Port within an N_Port group. To effectively use
this policy, it is recommended that you map devices to desired N_Port groups before enabling this
policy. The Port Grouping policy must be enabled before you can enable Device Load Balancing.
Manually created mappings from devices to N_Ports take precedence over automatically created
mappings. Refer to
on page 41 for details on connection priority for AG port mapping.
For more information on device mapping, refer to
on page 33.
Enabling the Device Load Balancing policy
Use the following steps to enable Device Load Balancing.
Upgrade and downgrade considerations for the Port Grouping policy
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Access Gateway Administrator's Guide
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