Brocade 200E Switch Config

[sgoodwin3]

I have a pair of Brocade 200E switches that attach several windows 2003EE SQL 2005 clusters to an HP EVA 4000. I use mulitple Emulex HBAs with HPDSM MPIO for path redundancy/failover. The storage configuration is redundant at all levels (dual controllers, multipathed HBA's, redundant switches, etc)

I need to add several more servers and a new netapp storage array to the existing production switch.

To accomplish this I have configured zones for the new equipment, and created a new config contianing new and existing zones. Now IO need to enable the new config. From what I understand, "enable config" will cause a very brief "pause" in IO.

My question is: Will this brief pause be seemlessly handled by MPIO (provided it is configured correctly of course)? I suspect it will but I am not a storage expert. I want to be toatlly safe as I have 20K users hitting this system.

I have to imagine adding hardware to switch configs is a common practice, especially for larger shops. I cant imaging having an outage everytime I add hardware...

Thanks for the help

 

[RMGBELGIUM]

MPIO has a default timeout value after which it will failover, and these values are set to several seconds ( 20 and higher ).Enabling a config of a switch takes about 1 second or so.This means that mpio will not failover when switching to a new config.
The users will not be impacted by that ( if your zones are correct ), I have done this many times before.

rgds,

R.