Brocade Flow Vision Administrators Guide (Supporting Fabric OS v7.3.0) - Manual (Page 59)

Flow Generator
● Overview of Flow Generator .......................................................................................... 59
● Creating Flow Generator flows........................................................................................63
● Activating Flow Generator flows......................................................................................65
● Learning in Flow Generator flows................................................................................... 65
● Viewing Flow Generator flows.........................................................................................66
● Deactivating Flow Generator flows................................................................................. 67
● Customizing Flow Generator flows................................................................................. 67
● Flow Generator examples .............................................................................................. 68
● Commands related to Flow Generator ........................................................................... 70
● SIM port attributes and configuration.............................................................................. 71
● Sending traffic using a Fabric Assigned WWN............................................................... 73
● Flow Generator and High Availability.............................................................................. 73
● Flow Generator and MAPS............................................................................................. 73
● Flow Generator limitations and considerations............................................................... 74
Overview of Flow Generator
Flow Generator is a test traffic generator designed to allow you to pre-test a SAN infrastructure
(including internal connections) for robustness before deploying it.
CAUTION
You should not use Flow Generator in an active production environment, as the Flow Generator
traffic can saturate the links and will impact the production traffic sharing the same links.
Flow Generator provides you with the ability to:
• Configure a 16 Gbps Gen 5 Fibre Channel-capable port as a simulated device that can transmit
frames at full 16 Gbps line rate.
• Emulate a 16 Gbps SAN without actually having any 16 Gbps hosts or targets or SAN-testers.
• Pre-test the entire SAN fabric at the full line rate, including optics and cables on ISLs as well as
internal connections within a switch.
Flow Generator achieves this using simulation mode (SIM) ports. SIM ports behave like normal F_Ports,
but are used only for testing. By using SIM ports, Flow Generator traffic is terminated at the destination
port and does not leave the switch. Refer to
SIM port attributes and configuration on page 71 for more
information on SIM ports.
Flow Generator can generate standard frames or create custom frames with sizes and patterns you
specify. A sample use case would be to create a traffic flow from a Source ID (SID) to a Destination ID
(DID) to validate routing and throughput.
Creating a flow from a specific source ID to a specific
destination ID on page 68 provides an example of the command and the results for this use case.
Flow Generator supports predefined flows to generate traffic between all configured SIM ports. Fabric
OS 7.3.0 supports 36 Virtual Channels (VCs), and balances the traffic generated from a SIM port to
multiple destinations by transmitting traffic using the same number of VCs for each destination.
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