Brocade Communications Systems 53-1001763-02 Admin Domain management for physical fabric administrators

344 Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide

53-1001763-02

Admin Domain management for physical fabric administrators

Admin Domains maintain continuity of service for Fabric OS features and operate in mixed-release

Fabric OS environments. High availability is supported with some backward compatibility.

When an E_Port comes online, the adjacent switches merge their AD databases. The receiving

switch accepts an AD database from the neighboring switch only if the local AD database is empty

or if the new AD database exactly matches both the defined and effective configurations of the

local AD database. If the AD database merge fails, the E_Port is segmented with an “AD conflict”

error code.

Admin Domain management for physical fabric administrators

This section is for physical fabric administrators who are managing Admin Domains. You must be a

physical fabric administrator to perform the tasks in this section.

You use the ad command to perform most of the tasks in this section. This command follows a

batched-transaction model, which means that changes to the Admin Domain configuration occur in

the transaction buffer.

An Admin Domain configuration can exist in several places:

•Effective configuration — The Admin Domain configuration that is currently in effect.

•Defined configuration — The Admin Domain configuration that is saved in flash memory. There

might be differences between the effective configuration and the defined configuration.

•Transaction buffer — The Admin Domain configuration that is in the current transaction buffer

and has not yet been saved or canceled.

How you end the transaction determines the disposition of the Admin Domain configuration in the

transaction buffer. The following commands end the Admin Domain transaction:

You can enter the ad --transshow command at any time to display the ID of the current Admin

Domain transaction.

To begin implementing an Admin Domain structure within your SAN, you must first set the default

zoning mode to No Access. You must be in AD0 to change the default zoning mode.

ad --save Saves the changes in the transaction buffer to the defined configuration in

persistent storage and propagates the defined configuration to all switches

in the fabric. Note that for delete and clear operations, if one or more of the

deleted Admin Domains are in the effective configuration, you cannot use

--save, but must use --apply instead.

ad --apply Saves the changes to the defined configuration in persistent storage and

enforces the defined configuration on all switches in the fabric, replacing the

effective configuration.

ad --transabort Aborts the transaction and clears the transaction buffer. The effective and

defined configurations remain unchanged.