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Brocade 3250 Fabric Switch
 
Brocade 48000 Director
 

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FCID (Unique Fabric Identifier for each port on the switch):

xx1yzz (in hex)
where xx is the domain of the switch
where y is the port
where the 1 was a place holder.
and zz is the loop id (AL_PA) - (Zeroes if it is a Fabric device)

The problem with Native PID format is that the 1 place holder makes it impossible to address more than 16 ports.

When Brocade came out with there first switch with more then 16 ports, they went to the following mechanism for determining FCID: This is called Core PID Format, or PID format 1

xxyyzz (in hex)
where xx is the domain of the switch
where yy is the port
and zz is the loop id (if it's a loop device)

This allows the switches in the fabric to address more than 16 ports (up to 256) on any switch in the fabric.

If you have a fabric tape drive, for example, on domain 3, port 5, loop ID 226, in PID Format 0, it could have an FCID (Fabric ID) of 0x0315e2. If you migrate that switch to PID format 1, it would then have an FCID (Fabric ID) of 0x0305e2.

Switches running PID 1 cannot ISL to switches running PID 0, and vice-versa. All switches in the fabric have to use the same PID value.

The drawback to changing to Core PID format is certain Operating Systems automatically bind their devices by the FCID value instead of by WWN. The most prevelant of these Operating Systems is HP-UX.

Since HP-UX binds all of it's devices by this FCID instead of by the Drive's Unique WWN, if you change your switch from Native mode to Core mode, you have to re-configure your HP-UX servers to see the device at the new FCID address. In other words, all the previous device references will be different after the PID change.

Brocade then came out with an Extended Edge PID, PID format 2, which starts counting it's ports at 0x10 (Port 16, in decimal), such as the following: 0x10 0x11 0x12, 0x1E 0x1F, 0x20, 0x21, 0x22, and so on, trying to merge together the benefits of PID 1 without losing the cardinal IDs of PID 0.


However, the PID 2 addressing scheme should only be implemented in environments where it is absolutely necessary. If a very large, legacy PID 0 fabric needs to be merged with a newer PID 1 fabric, and there is too many HP-UX or other FCID-binding hosts to reconfigure withing the allotted time.


It is, however, always a best practice to implement PID 1 fabric wide and reconfigure the servers wherever possible.

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