Brocade Fabric OS Administrator's Guide - Supporting Fabric OS v7.0.1 (53-1002446-01, March 2012)

Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide 503

53-1002446-01

FC-FC routing and Virtual Fabrics

FIGURE 81 Logical representation of EX_Ports in a base switch

Backbone-to-edge routing with Virtual Fabrics

Backbone-to-edge routing is not supported in the base switch, unless you use a legacy FC router. A

legacy FC router is an FC router configured on a Brocade 7500 switch or an FR4-18i blade.

Base switches can participate in a backbone fabric with legacy FC routers. You cannot connect

devices to the base switch because the base switch does not allow F_Ports. You can, however,

connect devices to the legacy FC router, thus enabling backbone-to-edge routing.

If you connect a legacy FC router to a base switch, you must set the backbone FID of the FC router

to be the same as that of the base switch.

In Figure 80, no devices can be connected to the backbone fabric (Fabric 8) because base

switches cannot have F_Ports. Figure 82 shows an FC router in legacy mode connected to a base

switch. This FC router can have devices connected to it, and so you can have backbone-to-edge

routing through this FC router. In this figure, Host A in the backbone fabric can communicate with

device B in the edge fabric with FID 20; Host A cannot communicate with device C, however,

because the base switches do not support backbone-to-edge routing.

Backbone fabric

Fabric 8

Edge fabric

Fabric 15

SW7

Edge fabric

Fabric 128

SW5

Fabric 1

SW6

SW2

SW8

SW1

SW4

SW3