Cisco Systems MDS 9000 In-Band Management and Out-of-Band Management

Send documentation comments to mdsfeedback-doc@cisco.com.

1-5

Cisco MDS 9000 Family Fabric Manager Configuration Guide

OL-6965-03, Cisco MDS SAN-OS Release 2.x

Chapter 1 Installation and Configuration

Cisco MDS 9000 Switch Management

•Device management provides tools to configure and manage a device within a system or a fabric.

You use device management tools to perform tasks on one device at a time, such as initial device

configuration, setting and monitoring thresholds, and managing device system images or firmware.

•Fabric management provides a view of an entire fabric and its devices. Fabric management

applications provide fabric discovery, fabric monitoring, reporting, and fabric configuration.

•Resource management provides tools for managing resources such as fabric bandwidth, connected

paths, disks, I/O operations per second (IOPS), CPU, and memory. You can use Fabric Manager to

perform some of these tasks.

•Data management provides tools for ensuring the integrity, availability, and performance of data.

Data management services include redundant array of independent disks (RAID) schemes, data

replication practices, backup or recovery requirements, and data migration. Data management

capabilities are provided by third-party tools.

•Application management provides tools for managing the overall system consisting of devices,

fabric, resources, and data from the application. Application management integrates all these

components with the applications that use the storage network. Application management

capabilities are provided by third-party tools.

In-Band Management and Out-of-Band Management

Cisco Fabric Manager requires an out-of-band (Ethernet) connection to at least one Cisco MDS 9000

Family switch. You need either mgmt0 or IP over Fibre Channel (IPFC) to manage the fabric.

The out-of-band management connection is a 10/100 Mbps Ethernet interface on the supervisor module,

labeled mgmt0. The mgmt0 interface can be connected to a management network to access the switch

through IP over Ethernet. You must connect to at least one Cisco MDS 9000 Family switch in the fabric

through its Ethernet management port. You can then use this connection to manage the other switches

using in-band (Fibre Channel) connectivity. Otherwise, you need to connect the mgmt0 port on each

switch to your Ethernet network.

Each supervisor module has its own Ethernet connection; however, the two Ethernet connections in a

redundant supervisor system operate in active or standby mode. The active supervisor module also hosts

the active mgmt0 connection. When a failover event occurs to the standby supervisor module, the IP

address and media access control (MAC) address of the active Ethernet connection are moved to the

standby Ethernet connection.

You can also manage switches on a Fibre Channel network using an in-band IP connection. The Cisco

MDS 9000 Family supports RFC 2625 IP over Fibre Channel, which defines an encapsulation method

to transport IP over a Fibre Channel network.

IPFC encapsulates IP packets into Fibre Channel frames so that management information can cross the

Fibre Channel network without requiring a dedicated Ethernet connection to each switch. This feature

allows you to build a completely in-band management solution.