Brocade 300/IBM SAN24B-4 Fibre switch and new host connectivity

[ranj]

Hi

Was wondering if I could get some help on adding an additional host into our VMware HA/DRS cluster. We are not able to successfully get the host to see the datastores on the SAN.

We have 2 IBM SAN24B-4 which I believe are rebranded Brocade fibre switches. We have setup the alias and zoning for the new host with the storage. It seems we do have connectivity through the switch as the switch can pick up the WWN for the host through the fibre gbit port it is configured on.

The new host we have put in is a newer generation of IBM server host than the previous 3. This server has 8GBps fibre connectivity through the card and the gbit which goes into the switch is only a 4gbps, would this create an issue with connectivity. We do know for sure that we are getting connectivity to the host and we are getting a green light which I assume indicates the connectivity is ok.


Both our fibre switches are running Fabric OS v6.1.1a and we have noticed that the latest version is v7.0.1, could it be that we need to upgrade the fibre switches to a recent version. Has anyone done upgrades on brocade switches? is it correct that you cannot do a straight firmware upgrade from one update to another?

The fibre switches have dual connections from the SAN to the hosts for redundancy, would we be able to upgrade 1 switch first and then do the other or are we likely to encounter problems?

If anyone has had experience with this, it would be good to hear back.

Many thanks

[CyberNerd]

Both our fibre switches are running Fabric OS v6.1.1a and we have noticed that the latest version is v7.0.1, could it be that we need to upgrade the fibre switches to a recent version. Has anyone done upgrades on brocade switches? is it correct that you cannot do a straight firmware upgrade from one update to another?

I've encountered this recently - you do need to do a firmware update.
On the switches we went to 6.2.2d (brocade 4gb/s). According to our tftp server we went to 6.0.1d-> 6.1.1a - 6.2.2d but not to V7.
Provided the servers have the RDAC driver installed and redundancy is working then you can upgrade them live.

We also upgraded the SAN firmware to 7.35.66 (this needs no access to SAN during upgrade)
I don't recall if this was absolutely necessary - probably as it was down for a good 20min whilst upgrading. I nearly had a heart attack in anticipation.