In my previous Brocade post, I talked about Brocade zoning, and mentioned at a high level what is required to implement zoning. Prior to jumping in and creating one or more zones in your fabric, you should add aliases to describe the devices that are going to be zoned together. An alias is a descriptive name for a WWN or port number, which makes your zone configuration much easier to read (if you are the kinda person who can spout off the WWNs of all of the devices in your fabric, you can kindly ignore this post). Brocade switches come with a number of commands to manage aliases, and these commands start with the string “ali”:
device-mapper (dm): working with multipath-tools. Part 1 Filed under: SCSI, Linux — admin @ 10:33 Device-mapper (hereafter, dm) is one of the best collection of device drivers that I have ever worked with. It brings high availability, flexibility and more to the Linux 2.6 kernel. Device-mapper is a Linux 2.6 kernel infrastructure that provides a generic way to create virtual layers of a block device while supporting stripping, mirroring, snapshots, concatenation, multipathing, etc. While many modules are built on top of device-mapper, the focus of this article is on multipath-tools. Note that I will be using the terms multipath, multipath-tools and dm-multipath interchangeably to signify the same package. Also note that dm-multipath is the name of the repackaged multipath-tools redistributed under Red Hat in their Advanced Server Linux distribution.
For Fibre Channel switches, the recent E-port spec should allow you to uplink switches from different vendors to expand SANs. It should be noted, however, that the E-port spec is still not universally implemented by all of the switch vendors. We highly en