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35-2
Cisco MDS 9000 Family Fabric Manager Configuration Guide
OL-6965-03, Cisco MDS SAN-OS Release 2.x
Chapter 35 Troubleshooting Your Fabric
Troubleshooting Tools and Techniques
Protocol Analyzer—If even deeper investigation is needed, the Cisco Protocol Analyzer for Fibre
Channel can be launched in-context from the Cisco Traffic Analyzer. The Cisco Protocol Analyzer
enables you to examine actual sequences of Fibre Channel frames easily using the Fibre Channel and
SCSI decoders Cisco developed for Ethereal.
Port Analyzer Adapter—Fabric Manager Server and Device Manager use SNMP to gather statistics.
They fully utilize the built in MDS statistics counters. Even so, there are limits to what the counters can
collect.
Integration with the Cisco Traffic Analyzer and Cisco Protocol Analyzer extend the MDS analysis
capabilities by analyzing the Fibre Channel traffic itself. The Cisco MDS 9000 Family Switched Port
Analyzer (SPAN) enables these solutions via a flexible, non-intrusive technique to mirror traffic
selectively from one or more ports to another MDS port within a fabric.
The Cisco Port Analyzer Adapter (PAA) encapsulates SPAN traffic in an Ethernet header for transport
to a PC or workstation for analysis. Both Fibre Channel control and data plane traffic are available using
SPAN. The PAA broadcasts the Ethernet packets, so they cannot be routed across IP networks. Hubs and
switches can be used, provided they are in the same Ethernet subnet. Direct connections between a PAA
and the PC are also supported. The PAA can reduce Ethernet traffic by truncating Fibre Channel data.
Both the Cisco Traffic Analyzer and Cisco Protocol Analyzer required the PAA to transport MDS SPAN
traffic to a PC or workstation.
Note The Cisco Traffic Analyzer works best with the Cisco Port Analyzer Adapter 2, because it provides a
length value for truncated data, enabling accurate byte count reporting.
Cisco Traffic Analyzer
The Cisco Traffic Analyzer for Fibre Channel provides real-time analysis of SPAN traffic or traffic
captured previously using the Cisco Protocol Analyzer. The Fibre Channel traffic from multiple Cisco
Port Analyzer Adapters (PAA) can be aggregated and analyzed by the Cisco Traffic Analyzer.
There are limits to how may SPAN sources can be sent to a single SPAN destination port on an MDS.
Aggregation extends the amount of information that can be analyzed in a unified set of reports by the
Cisco Traffic Analyzer.
Note The aggregation capabilities are restricted to the information collect by Ethernet connections to a single
PC. Aggregation across multiple PCs is NOT available.
The Cisco Traffic Analyzer presents it reports through a Web server, so you can view them locally or
remotely. The traffic analysis functions are provided by ‘ntop’ open-source software, which was
enhanced by Cisco to add Fibre Channel and SCSI analysis and MDS enhanced inter-switch link (ISL)
header support for SPAN. ntop is available on the Cisco.com software download center, under the Cisco
Port Analyzer Adapter. ntop is also available on the Internet at http://www.ntop.org/ntop.html. The Cisco
enhanced ntop runs under Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems.
The Cisco Traffic Analyzer for Fibre Channel presents reports with network wide statistics. The
Summary Traffic report shows what percentage of traffic was within different ranges of frames sizes. A
breakdown of the percentage of traffic for each protocol like SCSI, ELS, etc. is provided. The average
and peak throughput for the SPAN traffic being analyzed are also provided.