Dell POWEREDGE M1000E - Manual (Page 70)

50 Access Gateway Administrator’s Guide
53-1001760-01
Trunking in Access Gateway mode
3
Enabling and disabling Failback for a port group
Use the following steps to enable or disable Failback policy on all the N_Ports belonging to the
same port group.
1. Connect to the switch and log in using an account assigned to the admin role.
2. Use the following commands to enable or disable Failback for a port group:
• Enter the ag
--
failbackenable pg pgid command to enable failback on a port group.
switch:admin> ag --failbackenable -pg 3
Failback policy is enabled for port group 3
• Enter the ag
--
failbackdisable pg pgid command to disable failback on a port group.
switch:admin> ag --failbackdisable -pg 3
Failback policy is disabled for port group 3
Upgrade and downgrade considerations for Failback
• Downgrading to Fabric OS v6.3.0 or earlier is supported.
• Upgrading from Fabric OS v6.3.0 is supported.
Trunking in Access Gateway mode
Brocade’s hardware-based Port Trunking feature enhances management, performance, and
reliability of Access Gateway N_Ports when they are connected to Brocade fabrics. Port Trunking
combines multiple links between the switch and AG module to form a single, logical port. This
enables fewer individual links, thereby simplifying management. This also improves system
reliability by maintaining in-order delivery of data and avoiding I/O retries if one link within the trunk
fails. Equally important is that framed-based trunking provides maximum utilization of links
between the AG module and the core fabric.
Trunking allows transparent failover and failback within the trunk group. Trunked links are more
efficient because of the trunking algorithm implemented in the switching ASICs that distributes the
I/O more evenly across all the links in the trunk group.
Trunking in Access Gateway is mostly configured on the Edge switch. To enable this feature, you
must install the Brocade ISL license on both the Edge switch and the module running in AG mode
and ensure that both modules are running the same Fabric OS version. If a module already has an
ISL Trunking license, no new license is required. After the trunking license is installed on a switch in
AG mode and you change the switch to standard mode, you can keep the same license.
How Trunking works
Trunking in Access Gateway mode provides a trunk group between N_Ports on the AG module and
F_Ports on the Edge switch module. With trunking, any link within a trunk group can go offline or
become disabled, but the trunk remains fully functional and no re-configuration is required.
Trunking prevents reassignments of the Port ID when N_Ports go offline.