Fabric OS Administrator's Guide v7.0.0 (53-1002148-02, June 2011)

Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide 3

53-1002148-02

Chapter

Understanding Fibre Channel Services

In this chapter

•Fibre Channel services overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

•Management Server . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

•Platform services. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

•Management server database . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

•Topology discovery. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

•Device login . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

•High availability of daemon processes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Fibre Channel services overview

Fibre Channel services define service functions such as the Name Server, Management Server,

Security Key Distribution Server, and Time Server. Every Brocade switch has reserved three-byte

addresses referred to as well-known addresses. These services provided by Brocade switches

reside at these addresses and provide a service to either nodes or management applications in the

fabric.

FIGURE 1 Well-known addresses

Fabric Login — The Fabric Login server assigns a fabric address. This allows a fabric node to

communicate with services on the switch or other nodes in the fabric. The fabric address assigned

to a nodes is a 24-bit address (0x000000) containing three - 3-byte long nodes. Reading from left

to right, the first node (0x000000), represents the domain ID, the second node (0x000000) the

port area number of the port where the node is attached, and the third node (0x000000) the

arbitrated loop physical address (AL_PA), if applicable.

Directory Server — The Directory Server or Name Server is used to register fabric and public nodes

and query to discover other devices in the fabric.

Fabric Controller — The Fabric Controller provides State Change Notifications (SCNs) to registered

nodes when a change in the fabric topology occurs.