Discovery
Discovery is the process by which SANnav Management Portal contacts the devices in your SAN. Before you can monitor and manage a fabric, you must first discover it.
For FC-FC routing, you must discover both the backbone fabric and the edge fabrics. The backbone fabric cannot be used to discover and manage the edge fabrics, and the edge fabrics cannot discover and manage the backbone fabric.
When you discover a fabric, monitoring is automatically enabled on the fabric and on all switches in the fabric. When monitoring is enabled, the following occurs:
• Data collection happens periodically at an interval that depends on the size of the SAN.
• SANnav interface displays are updated with the latest fabric and switch information.
• SANnav registers itself as an Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) trap recipient and Syslog message recipient.
Considerations for Monitoring Fabric OS 8.2.1 Switches
For optimal performance, you should monitor a fabric in only one instance of SANnav Management Portal, although up to two instances are supported to monitor the same fabric (two instances of SANnav or one instance of SANnav and one instance of Brocade Network Advisor).
If two instances of SANnav Management Portal are monitoring the same switch running Fabric OS 8.2.1 or later, the following features display data in only the first instance:
• Network Port Traffic Conditions dashboard
• High-granularity performance data collection
• Zoom and Fetch in performance Investigate view
If one instance of SANnav Management Portal and one instance of Brocade Network Advisor are monitoring the same switch running Fabric OS 8.2.1 or later, you should disable historical data collection in Brocade Network Advisor for that switch.
Seed Switch
A seed switch is the switch that you use to discover the fabric. During fabric discovery, you provide the IP address and credentials of a switch in the fabric. This switch then becomes the seed switch. After discovering the fabric, you can change the seed switch.
It is strongly recommended that you choose the seed switch based on the following criteria:
• Choose a switch running the highest firmware version in the fabric.
• Choose a Virtual Fabrics-enabled switch, if the fabric has switches that are enabled for Virtual Fabrics.
• Choose a Virtual Fabrics-capable switch, if no switches in the fabric are enabled for Virtual Fabrics.
• Choose a director, if the fabric has both directors and fixed-port switches.
The seed switch is not the same as the principal switch. You select the seed switch when you discover the fabric. The seed switch collects all fabric-wide data, such as fabric membership, connectivity, name server information, and zoning information. The principal switch, on the other hand, is automatically elected when the fabric is formed. The principal switch maintains time and manages domain ID assignment for the fabric.
If a switch running in Access Gateway mode is used as the seed switch, the switch is discovered as a standalone fabric. Other switches and end devices in the fabric are not discovered. To discover the entire fabric, select a switch other than the Access Gateway switch to be the seed switch.
The Brocade Analytics Monitoring Platform cannot be used as a seed switch.
If you are using SANnav with a Base license, a director cannot be used as a seed switch.
Discovery Prerequisites
Before you can discover a fabric, the following prerequisites must be met:
• All switches in the fabric must be running Fabric OS 7.4.0 or higher.
• The seed switch must be reachable from the SANnav server using SNMP and the protocol that was selected for server-to-switch communication during installation. :
This setting is available in the following file: <install_HOME>/conf/server.properties. Check the value for the dcm.server.switch.comm.preference property.
# Server to Switch Communication preference
# 0 --> HTTP Only
# 1 --> HTTPS Only
# 2 --> First HTTPS and then HTTP
dcm.server.switch.comm.preference=2
If you change this property in the file, you must restart all services to make the change effective.
• If a Fabric Configuration Server (FCS) policy is enabled, the seed switch must be a primary FCS.
Note that if you are using SANnav with a Base license and a director is a member of the fabric, the director is discovered, but its status is "Not manageable".
Note that the supported network latency is 100ms. The network latency between SANnav Management Portal and the SAN it is managing should not exceed 100ms.
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