Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide 371
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The Brocade 7800 Upgrade license 16

The Brocade 7800 Upgrade license

The Brocade 7800 has four Fibre Channel (FC) ports and two GbE ports active by default. The
number of physical ports active on the Brocade 7800 is fixed. There is one upgrade license to
activate the rest of the FC and GbE ports for a total of 16 FC ports and six GbE ports. The Upgrade
license activates FC and GbE ports, and also activates additional features outlined in Table 79.

ICL licensing

Brocade ICL links operate between the Core blades on the DCX and DCX-4S enterprise-class
platforms. Typically, if both Core blades are installed then they are active on the DCX and DCX-4S
enterprise-class platforms.
ICL ports can be used only with an ICL license. ICL ports can be used only with an ICL license. On
the Brocade DCX-4S, the ICL 8-link license enables all eight links in an ICL. However, on a Brocade
DCX, the ICL 8-link license enables only eight links out of the 16 links within an ICL. If you are going
to create ICLs between a Brocade DCX and DCX-4S, they only need the ICL 8-link license on both
platforms. On the Brocade DCX-4S an ICL 16-link license would result in eight unused links
because it can only support ICL connections with eight links. After the addition or removal of a
license, the license enforcement is performed on the ICL ports only when the portDisable and
portEnable commands are issued on the ports. An ICL license must be installed on both Brocade
DCX and DCX-4S Backbones forming the ICL connection.

ICL 16-link license

Provides dedicated high-bandwidth links between two Brocade DCX chassis, without consuming
valuable front-end eight Gbps ports. Each Brocade DCX chassis must have the ICL 16-link license
installed in order to enable the full 16-link ICL connections. This license is available for the Brocade
DCX only.

ICL 8-link license

This license activates all eight links on ICL ports on a Brocade DCX-4S chassis or half of the ICL
bandwidth for each ICL port on the Brocade DCX platform by enabling only eight links out of the 16
links available. This allows you to purchase half the bandwidth of the Brocade DCX ICL ports initially
and upgrade with an additional ICL 8-link license to utilize the full ICL bandwidth at a later time.
This license is also useful for environments with ICL connections between a Brocade DCX and a
DCX-4S, the latter of which cannot support more than eight links on an ICL port. Available on the
Brocade DCX-4S and DCX platforms only.
TABLE 79 Base to Upgrade License Comparison
Feature Base model Upgrade License
Number of Fibre Channel (FC) ports 4 16
Number of GbE ports 2 6
Number of 10-GbE ports 0 0
Number of FCIP Tunnels 2 6
Tape Pipelining over FCIP Tunnel No Yes