Brocade Fabric OS Administrators Guide (Supporting Fabric OS v7.3.0) - Manual (Page 25)

Understanding Fibre Channel Services
● Fibre Channel services overview.................................................................................... 25
● Management server........................................................................................................ 26
● Platform services.............................................................................................................26
● Management server database........................................................................................ 27
● Topology discovery......................................................................................................... 30
● Device login.....................................................................................................................32
● High availability of daemon processes............................................................................34
Fibre Channel services overview
Fibre Channel services define service functions that reside at well-known addresses. A well-known
address is a reserved three-byte address for each service. Services are provided to either nodes or
management applications in the fabric.
FIGURE 1 Well-known addresses
Fabric Login -- The Fabric Login server assigns a fabric address to a fabric node, which allows it to
communicate with services on the switch or other nodes in the fabric. The fabric address is a 24-bit
address (0x000000) containing three 3-byte nodes. Reading from left to right, the first node (0x00 0000)
represents the domain ID, the second node (0x0000 00) the port area number of the port where the
node is attached, and the third node (0x000000 ) the arbitrated loop physical address (AL_PA), if
applicable.
Directory server -- The directory server or name server registers fabric and public nodes and conducts
queries to discover other devices in the fabric.
Fabric controller -- The fabric controller provides State Change Notifications (SCNs) to registered nodes
when a change in the fabric topology occurs.
Time server -- The time server sends the time to the member switches in the fabric from either the
principal switch or, if configured, the primary fabric configuration server (FCS) switch. Refer to
Configuring Security Policies on page 209 for additional information on FCS policies.
Management server -- The management server provides a single point for managing the fabric. This is
the only service that users can configure. Refer to
Management server on page 26 for more details
Alias server -- The alias server keeps a group of nodes registered as one name to handle multicast
groups.
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