Brocade Fabric OS Administrators Guide (Supporting Fabric OS v7.3.0) - Manual (Page 268)

NOTE
A note on terminology: Virtual Fabrics is the name of the suite of features. A logical fabric is a type of
fabric that you can create using the Virtual Fabrics suite of features.
Logical switch overview
Traditionally, each switch and all the ports in the switch act as a single Fibre Channel switch (FC
switch) that participates in a single fabric. The logical switch feature allows you to divide a physical
chassis into multiple fabric elements. Each of these fabric elements is referred to as a logical switch .
Each logical switch functions as an independent self-contained FC switch.
NOTE
Each chassis can have multiple logical switches.
Default logical switch
To use the Virtual Fabrics features, you must first enable Virtual Fabrics on the switch. Enabling
Virtual Fabrics creates a single logical switch in the physical chassis. This logical switch is called the
default logical switch.
The default logical switch initially contains all of the ports in the physical chassis.
The following figure shows a switch before and after enabling Virtual Fabrics. In this example, the
switch has 10 ports, labeled P0 through P9.
Logical switch overview
268 Fabric OS Administrators Guide
53-1003130-01