Joining two SANs

[kshipley]

I need to join to independent SANs together into one large SAN. Independently they are both simple setups. They each have a single disk resource, two fabrics (1 switch in each fabric), and nodes with dual hbas for redundancy.

To join this I am thinking of just connecting switch A from the first san to switch A of the second SAN using two ISLs and repeating for the B switches. I know that I must give them unique DomainIDs prior to connecting them. My question is how the zoning information will "combine". They are all brocade switches, the first SAN has 8 port versions and the second has a 16 port version.

Is this a pretty sound way of approaching this or should I come at this from a different angle? Thanks!

 

[Breslau]

if you have any conflicts with zoning, say repeating aliases, then your fabric will segment. if you are at different levels of FabricOS, then you may want to make sure they're compatible with each other, or upgrade.

 

[RMGBELGIUM]

beware, some setups do not like 2 ISL's per fabric.Be sure to respect port settings for distance between the 2 switches in each fabric ( right type of jbics as well )
You should try and have same switch types in 1 fabric to avoid problems,and keep switches on same OS level for the same reason.

rgds,

R.

 

[kshipley]

Will the switches automatically try to reconfigure when they sense the ISL or will I have to bounce them?

 

[Chacalinc]

As far as I know, you need to configure trunking by commands, but with or with no trunking, ISL runs fine automatically.

Cheers,

Chacal, Inc.