I wanted to conclude my Brocade zoning posts by discussing a couple of best practices. Two issues I have seen in the real world are inconsistent and non-descriptive names, and a lack of configuration backups. Using descriptive names such as “Fabric1Switch1Port8” or “AppServer1Port1” makes the output quite a bit more readable, which is extremely helpful when you are trying to gauge the impact of a faulty initiator or SFP at 3am.
Backing up the configuration on a switch is super easy to do, and there are a number of tools available to automate this process (I have written pexpect scripts to do this). To perform a manual backup of a switch configuration, you can run the “configupload” utility:
Fabric1Switch1:admin> configupload
Server Name or IP Address [host]: 192.168.1.125
User Name [user]: matty
File Name [config.txt]: switch1config.txt
Protocol (RSHD or FTP) [rshd]: ftp
Password:
upload complete
This will prompt you for the IP of a server to write the configs to, as well as the name of the file to write the configuration to. I have thoroughly enjoyed working with Brocade switches over the past few years, and really enjoy the simplicity and power that they provide in their CLI. Nice!