Fabric OS v6.4.1 Release Notes v1.0 Page 22 of 62
Other Important Notes and Recommendations
Management Server Platform Capability support changes in FOS v6.4
FOS v6.4 no longer automatically enables the Management Server (MS) Platform capability when a switch
attempts to join a fabric that has these services enabled. This prevents a FOS v6.4 switch from joining such a
fabric, and ISL will be disabled with a RAS log message. To allow a FOS v6.4 switch to join such fabrics
msPlMgmtActivate command should be used to enable the Management Server platform services explicitly
.
FCIP, FCIP Trunking and High Bandwidth (Brocade 7800 and FX8-24)
• IPsec is not supported on XGE0 of FX8-24 blade starting with FOS v6.4. IPsec is supported on
XGE1 and GE0 through GE9.
• IPsec is supported on FCIP tunnels that use only IPV4 connections.
• FICON networks with FCIP tunnels do not support DPS (aptpolicy 3) configurations. This applies to
both emulating and non-emulating FCIP tunnels.
• The maximum supported MTU size for the Brocade 7800/FX8-24 is 1500.
• FCIP connections are supported only between the Brocade 7800/FX8-24 and another 7800/FX8-
24. FCIP tunnels are not supported between the 7800/FX8-24 and the previous generation
Brocade 7500/FR4-18i platforms.
• When multiple FCIP tunnels are present on a switch and additional circuits (and the network
bandwidth provided by those circuits) are added to an already active tunnel, there may be a short
period of time where some frame loss can occur due to the process to re-fresh the internal FC
frame routing tables in the switch. Therefore, additional circuits should only be added during low
I/O periods utilizing the FCIP Tunnel being modified. In addition, if the circuit operation
(addition/deletion) to the tunnel increases/decreases the total tunnel bandwidth, an FCIP Tunnel
(VE port) disable/enable sequence should be performed after the addition/deletion of the circuit.
This will allow the switch to adjust the internal routes to utilize the new bandwidth fully.
• Switching modes between 10G and 1G is disruptive for FCIP traffic.
• Keep alive timeout (milliseconds) - Valid range is 500ms to 7,200,000ms (inclusive).
FOS default value is 10000ms (10 seconds). If FICON is configured the recommended
value is 1000 ms (1 second), otherwise the recommended value is the default of 10
seconds. For impairment networks with 100ms latency and 0.5% packet loss, keep-alive
time out should be configured as 30seconds. If the local and remote circuit
configurations’ Keep Alive Timeout values do not match, the tunnel will use the lower of
the two configured values.
• Software compression (available on the 7800 and FX8-24) modes 2 and 3 are only
supported in Open Systems environments.
• In order to perform the following operations it is necessary to delete the FCIP
configuration on the affected ports first:
o Switching modes between 1G/10G/Dual.
o
Moving VE/GE port between logical switches
.
• ARL (Adaptive Rate Limiting) is not supported on 10G tunnels.
• “Inband Management” is not supported on the Brocade 7800.
• FOS v6.4 only supports up to four 1 Gig Circuits per VE/FCIP Tunnel for the 1 gig
interfaces. A VE/FCIP Tunnel created over the 10 Gig Interfaces will be limited to 10
