Brocade Fabric OS Administrators Guide (Supporting Fabric OS v7.3.0) - Manual (Page 577)

Figure 93 shows a logical representation of the physical chassis and devices in Figure 92 . As shown in
Figure 93 , Fabric 128 and Fabric 15 are edge fabrics connected to a backbone fabric. Fabric 1 is not
connected to the backbone, so the device in Fabric 1 cannot communicate with any of the devices in
the other fabrics.
FIGURE 93 Logical representation of EX_Ports in a base switch
Backbone-to-edge routing with Virtual Fabrics
Backbone-to-edge routing is not supported in the base switch, unless you use a legacy FC router. A
legacy FC router is an FC router configured on a Brocade 7500 switch.
Base switches can participate in a backbone fabric with legacy FC routers. You cannot connect devices
to the base switch because the base switch does not allow F_Ports. You can, however, connect devices
to the legacy FC router, thus enabling backbone-to-edge routing.
If you connect a legacy FC router to a base switch, you must set the backbone FID of the FC router to
be the same as that of the base switch.
In Figure 92 on page 576, no devices can be connected to the backbone fabric (Fabric 8) because base
switches cannot have F_Ports. Figure 94 shows an FC router in legacy mode connected to a base
switch. This FC router can have devices connected to it, and so you can have backbone-to-edge routing
through this FC router. In this figure, Host A in the backbone fabric can communicate with device B in
the edge fabric with FID 20; Host A cannot communicate with device C, however, because the base
switches do not support backbone-to-edge routing.
Backbone-to-edge routing with Virtual Fabrics
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