Tag Archives: SAN

Brocade CF Replacement Hints

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This post is based on a submission from a reader of this blog Eberhard, maybe primarily of the popular Brocade SAN upgrades post. Many thanks for this, hoping it will help someone out there!

The topic here is how to replace the embedded Compact Flash card if that breaks.

You can read about how to do that in the PDF below:

brocade_cf_replacementDownload

If your CF drives are exactly the same size (not in GB, in blocks) as the one in Brocade then you could get away with dding the whole /dev/sda – which would simplify the process a little.

Again, many thanks for the contribution!

Setup a 3 Node Lustre Filesystem

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Introduction

Lustre is a filesystem often used by clusters because many computers can mount the filesystem simultaneously.

This is a small log/instruction for how to setup Lustre in 3 virtualized machines (one metadata server, one object storage server and one client).

Basic components:

VMWare Workstation
3 x CentOS 6.3 VMs.
Latest Lustre from Whamcloud

To use Lustre your kernel needs to support it. There’s a special one for server and one for the client. Some packages are needed on both.

Besides lustre you’ll need an updated version of e2fsprogs as well (because the version that comes from RHEL6.3 does not support large partitions).

Starting with the MDS. When the basic OS setup is done will make a copy of that to use for OSS and Client.

Setup basic services.

Install an MDS

This will run the MDT – the metadata target.

2GB RAM, 10GB disk, bridged networking, 500GB for /boot, rest for / (watch out, it may create a really large swap). Minimal install. Setup OS networking (static ip for servers, start on boot, open port 988 in firewall, possibly some for outgoing if you decide to restrain that too), run yum update and setup ntp. Download latest lustre and e2fsprogs to /root/lustre-client, lustre-server and e2fsprogs appropriately (x86_64). Lustre also does not support selinux, so disable that (works fine with it in enforcing until time to create mds/mdt, also fine with permissive until it’s time to mount).
Put all hostnames into /etc/hosts.
Poweroff and make two full clones.
Set hostname.

Install an OSS

This will contain the OST (object storage target). This is where the data will be stored.

Networking may not work (maybe device name changed to eth1 or eth2).
You may want to change this afterwards to get the interface back to be called (eth0). A blog post about doing that.

Install a client

This will access and use the filesystem.

Clone of the OSS before installing any lustre services or kernels.

Install Lustre

Before you do this it may be wise to take a snapshot of each server. In case you screw the VM up you can then go back :)

Starting with the MDS.

Installing e2fsprogs, kernel and lustre-modules.

Skipping debuginfo and devel packages, installing all the rest.

yum localinstall \ 
kernel-2.6.32-220.4.2.el6_lustre.x86_64.rpm kernel-firmware-2.6.32-220.4.2.el6_lustre.x86_64.rpm \
kernel-headers-2.6.32-220.4.2.el6_lustre.x86_64.rpm \
lustre-2.2.0-2.6.32_220.4.2.el6_lustre.x86_64.x86_64.rpm \ 
lustre-ldiskfs-3.3.0-2.6.32_220.4.2.el6_lustre.x86_64.x86_64.rpm \
lustre-modules-2.2.0-2.6.32_220.4.2.el6_lustre.x86_64.x86_64.rpm

The above was not the order they were installed. Yum changed the order so that for example kernel-headers was last.

yum localinstall e2fsprogs-1.42.3.wc3-7.el6.x86_64.rpm \
e2fsprogs-debuginfo-1.42.3.wc3-7.el6.x86_64.rpm \
e2fsprogs-devel-1.42.3.wc3-7.el6.x86_64.rpm \
e2fsprogs-libs-1.42.3.wc3-7.el6.x86_64.rpm \
e2fsprogs-static-1.42.3.wc3-7.el6.x86_64.rpm \
libcom_err-1.42.3.wc3-7.el6.x86_64.rpm \
libcom_err-devel-1.42.3.wc3-7.el6.x86_64.rpm \
libss-1.42.3.wc3-7.el6.x86_64.rpm \
libss-devel-1.42.3.wc3-7.el6.x86_64.rpm

After boot, confirm that you have lustre kernel installed by typing:

uname -av

and

mkfs.lustre --help

to see if you have that and

rpm -qa 'e2fs*'

to see if that was installed properly too.

By the way, you probably want to run this to exclude automatic yum kernel updates:

echo "exclude=kernel*" >> /etc/yum.conf

After install and reboot into new kernel it’s time to modprobe lustre, start creating MDT, OST and then mount things!
But hold on to your horses, first we ned to install the client :)

 

And then the Client

Install the e2fsprogs*

We cannot just install the lustre-client packages, because we run a different kernel than the ones that whamcloud have compiled the lustre-client against.

We can either back-pedal and install an older kernel. Or we can build (from source / SRPMS) a lustre-client that works on a kernel of our choosing. The later option seems like a better way, because we can then upgrade the kernel if we want to.

 

Build custom linux-client rpms

Because of a bug it appears that some ext4 source packages are needed – while they are not. You need to add some parameters to ./configure. This will be the topic of a future post.

The above rpmbuild should create rpms for the running kernel. If you want to create rpms for a non-running kernel you are supposed to be able to run.

Configure Lustre

Whamcloud have good instructions. Don’t be afraid to check out their wiki or use google.

/var/log/messages is the place to look for more detailed errors.

On the MDS

Because we do not have infiniband you want to change the parameters slightly for lnet to include tcp(eth0). These changes are not reflected until reboot (quite possibly something else) – but just editing a file under /etc/modprobe.d/ called for example lustre.conf is not enough.

Added a 5GB disk to the mds.

fdisk -cu /dev/sdb; n, p, 1, (first-last)

modprobe lustre lnet

mkfs.lustre –mdt –mgs

mount

On the OSS

Also add the parameters into modprobe.

mkfs.lustre –ost

mount

On the client

Add things into modprobe.

mount!

Write something.

Then hit: lfs df -h

To see usage!

 

Get it all working on boot

You want to start the MDS, then the OSS and last the client.
But while it’s running you can restart any node and eventually it will start working again.

Fstab on the client:
ip@tcp:/fsname /mnt lustre defaults,_netdev 0 0

Fstab on the OSS and MDS:
/dev/sdb1 /mnt/MDS lustre defaults,_netdev 0 0

While it’s running you can restart any node and eventually it will start working again.

Brocade Accredited Server Specialist – BASP

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http://www.brocade.com/education/certification-accreditation/accredited_server_connectivity/curriculum.page

I’m currently preparing for yet another accreditation, the previous one I took was the BADCS,

The BASP (Brocade Accredited Server Specialist) appear to focus on the server side. Things like:

  • how to install drivers
  • HBA management tools
  • describe features
  • how to run diagnostics

This accrediation has the most questions of all the current ones, but it has the same amount of time allotted (one hour) so this exam will have a lot less time available for each question.

The curriculum for this accreditation are also free, they are called Introduction to HBA and Introduction to CNA. There’s also some docs about the 1860 Fibre Adapter. They can be found on Brocade’s Saba/training website under my.brocade.com.

 

// Update 20140422: This accrediation has been replaced with something else. See the current list here: http://www.brocade.com/education/certification-accreditation/index.page?

Brocade Accredited Data Center Specialist – BADCS

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Time to study for another one :) Working my way towards the “Data Center Track”. To complete it it would be enough for me to complete 5 accreditations.

This one has a pretty cool name – BADCS!

http://www.brocade.com/education/certification-accreditation/accredited-data-center-specialist/prerequisites.page

I haven’t tried one of these Accredited exams before, but as far as I can tell:

  • Cheap: only 20$ USD
  • The exam is web based, no need to find a test center, you can do it exactly when you want to.
  • Accreditations do not expire
  • You don’t _have_ to take the course in the prerequisites before taking the exam, but it is recommended :)

Also, for this Accreditation the pre-requisite is the FC-101 course on brocade’s SABA page – and it’s free!

– The BADCS exam consists of 38 questions and lasts 60 minutes
– To pass this exam you must get a score of 71% or better 

So that’s about 27 correct out of 38 questions.

The objectives are on this page.

The only part I was initially not entirely sure about is the “Given a scenario, describe when portlog dumps are required”. The objectives indicate that a Fibre Channel theory knowledge is necessary, so the FC-101 course seems like a very good idea to study. I doubt many people remember specific FC mechanisms/theory if they don’t work with these occasionally. Like the well-known addresses – who remembers the address of the name-server or controller? =)

My general tip for the BADCS: Learn the material of the FC-101 course. Really. Learn. it.

You may be tricked into thinking that Brocade’s accrediations are easy because you can do them from home.

Access Gateway – NPV – TR

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Say what??

Access Gateway – Brocade

NPV (N_port Virtualization (not NPIV) – Cisco

Transparent Mode – QLogic

These are all names for the basic idea / functionality but as there’s no standard the vendors have made up their own names for it.

A switch in Access Gateway (AG) mode does not consume Domain IDs, you can do port mapping, needs NPIV on the port in the switch that it connects to. AG requires a switch / fabric to connect to as it doesn’t run the normal fibre channel services.

It is very useful in case you are going to mix vendors in your fabric. Meaning you can populate the core with Brocade switches and then connect other vendors’ switches in the above modes to the Brocade switches.

On some QLogic switches you can also set a port into TR-mode, see this post on HP’s EBC forum about how to do it. It is not exactly the same as AG or NPV, because you still need to do zoning on the QLogic switch.

There is also the IPM by Qlogic for IBM – it looks like a module that you cannot switch between ‘fabric’ and ‘IPM’ mode. Which is what you can do on a Cisco or on a Brocade switch.

 

Storage FC HBA Transfer Size Tuning

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HP just published an advisory describing how to tune some parameters for Emulex, Qlogic and Brocade Fibre Channel HBAs: c02518189. It sounds like these are new, but these changes have been around for at least 6 months in all three vendors’ HBAs.

Emulex

“Emulex driver version 2.42.002 or later, along with OneCommand Manager version 5.1.53.2 or later,”

Use HBAnywhere to change these.

Examples to tune the server or port level transfer size:

  • 128 kbytes, set the LimTransferSize = 2 and ExtTransferSize = 0 (default)
  • 512 kbytes, set the LimTransferSize = 0 (default) and ExtTransferSize = 0 (default)
  • 1 Mbytes, set the LimTransferSize = 0 (default) and ExtTransferSize = 1

Qlogic

This is part of the Qlogic SANSurfer utility.

  • c:\>qlfc -tsize /fc
  • c:\>qlfc -tsize /fc /set 128
  • c:\>qlfc -tsize /fc /set default

Brocade

  • bcu drvconf –key bfa_max_xfer_len –val 64
  • bcu drvconf –key bfa_max_xfer_len –val 128

BCFP – good threads in the brocade forum

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How to set up two FCIP tunnels between two B7500: http://community.brocade.com/message/15261

Connecting two sites via FCR: http://community.brocade.com/message/16828#16828

Set up FCIP between two B7800: http://community.brocade.com/message/14216#14216

Why is there an IP in ipaddrshow on FC interfaces: http://community.brocade.com/message/3978#3978

 

 

 

 

BCFP – more studying

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OK, so now you’ve been studying for a while? Read the material once or twice, made notes. Have you read more details about a command in the command reference guide, or more details about a technique in the FCIP Admin Guide or the FOS guide? Or how do you do your studying?

Now would be a good time to head over to the page where you see the requirements/objectives of the exam.

Write them down and think about each. Could you for example ‘Demonstrate knowledge of how to manage FCIP/FC distributed external solutions’ ? No? Why not? What parts about it do you not understand, are there any foggy parts, etc. If you can explain this to somebody, that’s a great achievement (now you just have to find somebody who doesn’t get glazed eyes but listening to you talk about fibre channel).
Maybe if you imagine a presentation (like in school) and you have to tell somebody about this specific feature. What would you go over?

Two weeks left for me now. Just hit me today that it’s 4 hours long and 180+ questions (so about 1min 20seconds per question). My brain is not going to function very well after the test. Gotta stock up on carbs, don’t drink before.

BCFP – 16G Studying

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Another studying tip!

Head over to the forum/community at Brocade. Do it. After you read this post :p

For example in the BCFP there will be questions about NPIV, so it makes sense to read the forum for threads regarding NPIV. Right? I mean there’s bound to be troubleshooting, and getting some ‘real’ experience troubleshooting SAN is quite hard to get, especially with stuff like FCIP/FCR.

Example link: http://community.brocade.com/message/18897#18897

You don’t need an account. If you register you don’t get access to much anyway.

Here is one as an example. But there are lots of posts there and there’s a ton to learn. I usually just troll/help out on HP’s Enterprise Server/Storage forum but I think I’ll start reading on this as well.

BCFP – VF – Virtual Fabrics

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The free material does not go through the virtual fabrics and the exam objectives does not mention them specifically. Even so – it’s probably a good idea to get some grip about it anyway as it is mentioned in the BCFP 8G material and there are questions concerning it in the Nutshell Guide and the BCFP 8 knowledge assessment. Also it is mentioned in the pre-requisites for the BCFP (the AFS 141).

Brocade’s overview page of Virtual Fabrics.

 FAQ on Virtual Fabrics

 

There is also quite a lot of information about VF in the FOS Administration Guide. You can find this guide in lots of places but it is in the exam objectives in the link above.

The theory

It is what it says it is – a way to create independent and logical fabrics and switches that you can use to segment your SAN.
It does not require a license.

There’s logical fabrics and logical switches.

From the FAQ:
A Logical Fabric is an implementation of a Fibre Channel fabric with one or more Logical
Switches participating in the fabric. A Logical Fabric has its own independent instance of
fabric services, name server, zoning database, and so on.

A logical switch needs a fabric id. Default is 128 but can be changed. Same FID cannot be used for same logical switch in the same chassi. You move ports from the default to the new switches. VE_ and EX_ ports needs to be configured after the move. LD, QoS, F_port buffers/trunking may not be enabled on the port.

Max 8 VFs in the DCX, enabling it is disruptive (requires a reboot).

DCX uses 10-bit addressing. Uses part of the last part of the ALPA part of the PID.
Means that that part of the PID does not always indicate a port area.
Increases limit of NPIV, support loop devices.

Hardware

For 8G products it’s available on the DCX, B5100 and the B5300.
For 16G it’s available on 6510, VA-40FC
FC10-6, FS8-18, FCOE10-24 ports can only be part of the default switch.

 

(X)ISL — interconnecting switches

The default switch – is the first logical switch you create.

To connect a logical switch (henceforth known as LS) to another one you can just have one of the ports in the LS as an E_port, or you can use XISL – extended ISL.

To use XISL you designate one LS as a base switch. This is used for interconnects and you can have ISLs for several fabrics on this one port/cable. It can have E, VE and EX, VEX ports. *x_ports can only be in the base switch. One base switch per chassi, on DCX platforms the default cannot be the base switch. You connect the base switch to other base switches and then the other logical switches with the same FID merge. By default the logical switches are enabled to use XISL. You can combine normal ISL and XISL. Normal ISL have a lower cost.

ISL (between physical switches)
DISL (between Logical Switches)
IFL (routing, not merging)
XISL (several LISLs inside)
LISL (part of an XISL)

With XISL a logical port is created, their WWN start with 5x.

CLI

fosconfig –enable vf
lscfg –create FID [-base] [-force]; setcontext FID; swichdisable (set Domain ID etc); configure; switchenable
lscfg –config 128 -slot <slot> -port <port>
lscfg –delete non-default-logical-switches
lscfg –show
lscfg –change 5 –newfid 7 (disables switch and sets it); fosexec –fid FID -cmd “switchenable”

fosexec –fid FID  -cmd “cmd” (how to run a command on another LS)
fosexec –fid all -cmd “cmd” (on all logical switches)
ipaddrset -ls 123 –add 10.10.10.10/24 (set an IP for a logical switch, to segment management)

 

SAN Primer – Introduction to Data Storage

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You may have heard about this storage or SAN stuff, but what is it? Is it complicated and cool? Yes. Now it doesn’t have to be complicated, but it sure can be sometimes.
This post is just a brief primer/introduction to storage and what it entails. In case maybe you got a job interview or just would like to know a little bit more about it.

I’ll update this post as I go, last update 2012-07-13 – added some books and free pdfs and links.

What is a SAN?

‘Storage Area Network’ – or storage network.
Generally it doesn’t have to be a ‘network’ it could just be direct connected equipment or peer 2 peer. But what it always entails is a shared storage, most often disk or tape.

What is in a SAN?
When it comes to disk storage on fibre channel there’s a few standard components: FC HBA in the server, SFP and cables, SAN-switch, SFP and cables, FC port in the disk array controller and then there’s something behind the controller that connects disks.

You can connect the FC HBA directly to the disk array.

What is storage?
It’s somewhere where you can store data. Most common today would be: hard drives, flash drives (ssd), magnetic media (tape) and optical media (dvd/blueray/cd).  In a computer you cannot fit hundred of hard drives, but sometimes there is an application that requires lots and lots of data (maybe for example CAD drawings, video editing). This is when a SAN comes in, with only the help of for example a fibre channel card you can give a server access to lots of storage.

How do you do it?
If you want to give a server disk space from a fibre channel SAN this is what you do:

  1. Fullfil the hardware requirements (so fibre channel HBA+drivers and multipath software, SAN-switch, disk array and sfps + cables)
  2. On the SAN-switch create a zone with the disk array’s and the FC HBA’s domain id, port id or port wwn. It’s possible to do it without zones, but they are good for fault isolation.
  3. On the disk array you should now see the server/host, create a disk and map/present it to the host.
  4. On the host you most likely need to do a rescan/reinitialize of the fc-bus.
  5. After the server sees the LUN it will have a new hard disk available, you can use your normal partitioning/format/filesystem tools to create some usable space.

Can I use the same disk on two servers?
This is a pretty common question, the answer is sometimes and the sometimes depends on which file system you are using. It needs to support that more than one host can access it at the same time. NTFS does not support this and if you try it anyway you’ll corrupt the file system. For Windows you need to look into CSV – clustered shared volumes or other networked file systems like NFS/CIFS.

What is the difference between fibre channel and iscsi?

FC is sending SCSI commands over fibre channel, it’s not always fibre or optical cables.
While iSCSI is sending SCSI commands over TCP/IP.
FC is a whole network technology while iSCSI is running on top of a network technology -> TCP/IP.

Some literature:

Both the IBM and the HP one are quite lengthy. The HP one has a lot of HP specific guides, best practices and supported configurations. The FC 101 by Brocade actually goes quite deep into the theory of the FC protocol.

BCFP – Brocade Certified Fabric Professional 16G Beta Exam

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More studying. Only a month and a half to go.

Currently repeating/re-reading BCFA stuff and mostly focusing on the new stuff. Expect to do this this whole week but gradually weave in more BCFP stuff.

An idea – I don’t think I need to re-hearse the BCFA that much. The objectives between the two exams are very different and there’s no overlap as far as I can tell. Focusing more on the BCFP now but it was nice anyway to do a short repeat of the BCFA stuff, get back in the game.

The Material

I’ve been going through what’s recommended (the material) and these are the useful pages:
Please note that the second item in each list is the actual page number in the document.
I also took the liberty of adding pages before/after in case they were adding context to the page. It’s not like I’m going to try to remember the pages by heart. And quite often the pages referenced by Brocade were just one page in the middle of a chapter.

For example page 63 in FOS Admin Guide 7 is either about setting ipaddr or routing/FC NAT. I think it’s the FC NAT. Page 77 is either for adressing/WWN based PID assignment or lossless DLS. Page 80 is port numbering schemes for various blades or Forward Error Correction. 99 is verifying syslog/audit log or introduction to RADIUS/LDAP. 117-118 is lossless DLS or overview of IP protocols.
Page 3 in the troubleshooting guide is to the document history or one of the pages with list of common symptoms. Also Page 1 in FCIP Admin Guide is probably not the one they meant :)

There’s some really weird ones in the admin guide. For example page 582 does not exist in FOS admin or 132 is empty in FCIP Admin guide , in both real page counters and the numbers on the pages in the book.

Also some starting/ending points/pages are a little strange, why cut it off there and not the whole chapter/section?

From the Brocade Certified group on facebook I saw that these pages numbers were used to writing a/questions on the exam. Guess this explains why some of the pages are odd, maybe they were written down at a previous version of the document or they just don’t want to document everything :) In the same group they claim that the page they used is the one on the actual page, not the one in for example adobe reader. This means the numbers under Real are the ones pointing to the right pages.

Anyway, with the details from http://community.brocade.com/docs/DOC-2041 here we go:

Updated the numbers on FOS Admin guide (2011-08-18)

  • Fabric OS Administrators Guide v7.0 (53-1002148-02)
    • Pages 63,77,80,99,100,117,118,128,133,137,200,272-281,287-302,372,382,395,404-412,413,418,422-433,435-438,447-481,582
    • Real Pages: 102-103, 120, 139, 168, 173-174, 177, 240, (271-303), 311-343, 410, 412, 422, 435, 444-453, 458-478, 487-521,
  • Fabric OS Command Reference Guide v7.0 (53-1002147-01)
    • Pages 239,244-246,283-290,380-383,609,610,637,653,661-663,701-710,714-717,824,885,930,953-956,1028,1029,1083
    • Real Pages: 273, 278-280, 316-324, 643, 644, 671, 687, 695-697, 735-744, 748-751, 857-858, 918-920, 964, 987-990, 1061-1063
  • Fabric OS Troubleshooting Guide v7.0 (51-1002150-02)
    • Pages 3,22,31,38,92,
    • Real Pages: 23, 43-44, 51-52, 112
  • Brocade 1860 Datasheet (GA-DS-1566-00)
  • Brocade SAN Health Family Data Sheet (GA-DS-870-03)
  • Fabric OS v7.0 Release Notes
    • Pages 11,12
    • Real Pages: 11, 12
  • Brocade Network Advisor SAN User Manual 11.1.x (53-1002167-01)
    • Pages xxxviii,xxxix,47-52,148,202,230-233,647,648,782,911
    • Real Pages: 38-39, 91-96, 192, 246, 274-277, 691-692, 826, 955
  • Brocade Network Advisor Installation Guide 11.1.x (53-1002320-01)
    • Page 9
    • Real Page: 9
  • Fabric OS FCIP Administrator’s Guide (53-1002155-01)
    • Pages 1,6,29-37,54,111-113,132
    • Real Pages: 15, 20-21, 43-52, 68, 125-127
  • Access Gateway Administrator’s Guide (53-1002156-01)
    • Pages 11,22,52,53,67-69,
    • Real Pages: 31, 42, 72-73, 87-89
  • Brocade Adapters Administrator’s Guide (53-1001923-01)
    • Page 35
    • Real Page: 57
  • Pre-release CFP 300 Course (unedited material)
    • Modules 2-8

BCFA – Brocade Certified Fabric Administrator 16G Beta

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I am currently going for the BCFP – fabric professional – exam, but I did the BCFA 6 months ago so I’ll re-read the material and of course there’s the new stuff with FOS 7, new hardware, 16g, new ASIC that I should probably learn as well.

Some new stuff

‘fabric name’ is a new feature. But this is also more usable in VF – which is not part of BCFA. Firmware upgrades are the same (phew).
DCFM is now called Network Advisor and it also has IP/routing and MPLS functionality now.
Of course the 16G blades (with the first 8 ports capable of handling 10GB FC) and the FC10-6 blades.
D_port diagnostics (set a port to this before joining it to a trunk, or use it to measure distance on a long distance link, is accurate up to 5m).
IDLE/ARB fill words are no longer necessary to configure (except on 8G platforms and not on Condor3).
Condor3 is the new ASIC for the 16G blades.
New/larger/longer/better ICL between the new directors that use QSFP instead of the crap max 2m copper cable.

Kindle

One thing that’s great about the kindle is that you can put the Brocade material on it (even in PDF) – just change viewing mode to landscape/horizontal and it will look great. Two pages per slide. I still have material from my old so that one works. But the material that is given for free now has 0 access rights so it does not work on the Kindle.

The way I write my personal notes is: write them off from the brocade material in my own words.

  1. I do this on google docs.
  2. I then download it into .doc and then
  3. e-mail it as an attachment to youraccount@free.kindle.com.
  4. Then next time you hook up your kindle to wifi it will download the documents, converted to .azw.

What’s important here is to not use lists, as the conversion from a google doc saved as word and then e-mailed to youraccount@free.kindle.com does not like lists, it only takes the first level in the list.

I instead used headers, lost of them.

This is also nice because you can put a TOC which is clickable on the kindle.

Also pictures work in this conversation.

BCFP 16g Exam Studying

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Right now I’m reading through the BCFA material and writing what I find useful in a google docs document – later I will take this and send to my Kindle – for some of that memorization :)

Think it’s a good idea to refresh some of the BCFA stuff before tackling the BCFP material, it was about 6 months ago since I took the BCFA and there are of course the new 16G hardware that was available then.

If you’re new to all this – do check out the FC 101 training by Brocade,  it is pretty awesome and I think I’ll listen/read it once or probably more before the exam. It’s good to refresh the fundamentals.

BCFP 16G Beta Exam Material

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After the announcement of the available material Fabric OS 7.0.0a has been released.

On the page http://community.brocade.com/docs/DOC-2041 only the first revision of the 7.0 release notes is available.

The BCFA 16G beta course material is also available, probably a good idea to read up on both and do a little rehearsing.

The old attachments are these:

  • 1860_FabricAdapter_DS.pdf (942.3 K)
  • FOS_TrblShoot_v700-02.pdf (1.8 MB)
  • FOS_CmdRef_v700.pdf (4.6 MB)
  • FOS_AdminGd_v700-02.pdf (7.2 MB)
  • FOS_FCIP_AdminGd_v700.pdf (2.8 MB)
  • NetworkAdvisor_SAN_InstallGd_v1110.pdf (450.3 K)
  • NetworkAdvisor_SAN_Manual_v1110.pdf (9.5 MB)
  • v7.0.0_releasenotes_v1.0.pdf (1.5 MB)
  • SH_Family_DS_03.pdf (157.7 K)
  • Brocade_Adapters_v2.3.0.0_Admin_Guide.pdf (1.5 MB)
  • AccessGateway_AdminGd_v700.pdf (919.0 K)

With my notes:

  • 1860_FabricAdapter_DS.pdf (this is just a brochure/data sheet of that product)
  • FOS_TrblShoot_v700-02.pdf (trbl and diag guide, 3 June 2011, 138p)
  • FOS_CmdRef_v700.pdf (cmd reference manual- 29 April 2011, 1132p)
  • FOS_AdminGd_v700-02.pdf (3 June 2011, 580p)
  • FOS_FCIP_AdminGd_v700.pdf (29 April 2011, 136p)
  • NetworkAdvisor_SAN_InstallGd_v1110.pdf (13 May 2011, 47p)
  • NetworkAdvisor_SAN_Manual_v1110.pdf (13 May 2011, 1301p)
  • v7.0.0_releasenotes_v1.0.pdf (29 April 2011, 125p)
  • SH_Family_DS_03.pdf (SAN Health Family, brochure/data sheet)
  • Brocade_Adapters_v2.3.0.0_Admin_Guide.pdf (27 October 2010, 292p)
  • AccessGateway_AdminGd_v700.pdf (29 April 2011, 102p)

The newer versions are not available if you have a registered account on my.brocade.com without any product registered to it. I’ve e-mailed Brocade asking for more access. In the meantime some are available on for example HP.com – but the Brocade release notes are not available there. And the HP Release notes for 7.0.0a have the HP names of the products.
On HP’s site you can go to the manuals for the 8/40 to get some more documents.

Actually it looks like the documents available are quite up to date. I guess the Admin Guides etc don’t update that often anyway. There is however a document in the manuals link above that explains that there have been some changes to some of the Brocade Documents. This might be worth checking out.

The conclusion of this little exercise is that the material available is currently good enough (for me).

Reading encrypted/password protected pdf on Linux

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The problematic PDF

The CFP300 material on http://community.brocade.com/docs/DOC-2041 is encrypted so that it cannot be printed/re-edited without a password.

If you try to open this with evince (default .pdf viewer in Gnome) it will ask for a password.
pdftotext (comes with the software suite poppler) says:

Error: Weird encryption info
Error: Incorrect password

It’s only the material starting with M0* that has this issue, this has also been seen with other documents. Maybe this is because they were created with a too new version of Adobe Acrobat that evince/pdftotext doesn’t support.
The rest of the material are going to be public and they are user/admin guides anyway. But the M0* files are from the actual course material for the 16G so this is why.

The solution on RHEL6 x64: install FoxitReader. Download the .rpm – then hit ‘rpm -Uvh FoxitReader-1.1-0.fc9.i386.rpm’ and it will be installed. To start it just hit ‘FoxitReader’.

Anyway I think it’s nice of Brocade to pre-release the course material for those doing the beta-test. If you want the real material the cheapest is 650$ and then you get the material, narration of the pdfs (usually good quality, not just reading off the presentations) and a few quite good lab exercises.

The Studying

Just threading along here with the material, slowly but steady.
I’m starting with the NPIV / Access Gateway stuff. It’s a bit more complicated than just a switch that isn’t its own domain, it’s also mapping the virtual WWN to the N_ports (a switch in AG mode has N_ports that connect to F_ports in another switch). Usually N_ports are on hosts’ and targets’ ports and the switches’ has the F_ports.

Latest FOS ( Fabric OS ) Firmware on HP’s Brocade SAN switches

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How to find the latest firmware for an HP Brocade SAN switch:

How to find out which Brocade Firmware is the latest and which is the last supported one?

  1. On HP SPOCK: http://h20272.www2.hp.com/ (this required an HP Passport, they are free to create).
  2. Go to Switches, then click on B-series connectivity stream.

The B-series conenctivity stream document gets updated often and it has the recommended (usually latest) and the supported Fabric OS releases for each switch type.

How to find the last supported firmware for an HP Brocade SAN switch:

Usually the EOL of a firmware is announced when a new one is released.
See this customer notice of 6.4.1b:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c02766238

HP’s Brocade firmwares compatible with other switches?

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After a question in my SAN switch firmware upgrade article I made a comparison of two downloads of 6.3.1b (one via IBM and one from HP) – the only differences were a file called ancillary and one called EULA.pdf. I used examdiff to find the differences.

All the sub-directories were the same, only the above two files were added in the HP one.
I believe quite strongly that you can use the HP firmwares to upgrade Brocade switches that are branded by other vendors.

At least IBM and normal Brocade ones.

As they are using the very same Brocade firmware that Brocade themself use, it might be hard for the vendors to change the switch that much.

It would be interesting to investigate if other vendors add something to make theirs not, but I have no way of acquiring such a firmware.

The EULA looks like a normal HP standard end user license agreement form. The HP ancillary.txt file contains this:

“This ancillary.txt file provides information as to how to obtain the open source or other third party licenses in this distribution. To obtain such licenses, run the following CLI command at the prompt, “opensource”.
This ancillary.txt file also provides the instructions for customers who require a copy of the
machine-readable GPL Source Code by written request.  Upon your written request, HP will provide to You, for a fee covering the cost of distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the GPL Source Code. Your written request for GPL Source Code can be sent via email to FC_Infrastructure_OpenSourceRequest@hp.com. In the request, include product name, version number, your name, and your shipping address. “