Dell POWEREDGE M1000E - Manual (Page 53)

Access Gateway Administrator’s Guide 33
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Port Grouping policy
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• The APC policy applies to all ports on the switch. Enabling the APC policy is disruptive and
erases all existing port-based mappings. Therefore, before enabling the APC policy, you should
disable the AG module. When you disable the APC policy, the N_Port configuration and the
port-based mapping revert back to the default factory configurations for that platform. It is
recommended that before you either disable or enable APC policy to save the current
configuration file using the configupload command in case you might need this configuration
again.
Upgrade and downgrade considerations for the APC policy
The following are supported:
• Downgrading to a Fabric OS level that supports the APC policy.
• Upgrading from Fabric OS v6.3.0 to Fabric OS v6.4.0 will maintain the policy that was enabled
in Fabric OS 6.3.0.
Port Grouping policy
Use the PG policy to partition the fabric, host, or target ports within an AG-enabled module into
independently operated groups. Use the PG policy in the following situations:
• When connecting the AG module to multiple physical or virtual fabrics.
• When you want to isolate specific hosts to specific fabric ports for performance, security, or
other reasons.
How port groups work
Create port groups using the ag --pgcreate command. This command groups N_Ports together as
“port groups.” By default, any F_Ports mapped to the N_Ports belonging to a port group will
become members of that port group. Port grouping fundamentally restricts failover of F_Ports to
the N_Ports that belong to that group. For this reason an N_Port cannot be member of two port
groups. The default PG0 group contains all N_Ports that do not belong to any other port groups.
Figure 8 on page 34 shows that.if you have created port groups and then an N_Port goes offline,
the F_Ports being routed through that port will fail over to any of the N_Ports that are part of that
port group and are currently online. For example, if N_Port 4 goes offline then F_Ports 7 and 8 are
routed through to N_Port 3 as long as N_Port3 is online because both N_Ports 3 and 4 belong to
the same port group, PG2. If no active N_Ports are available, the F_Ports are disabled. The F_Ports
belonging to a port group do not fail over to N_Ports belonging to another port group.