Dell PowerConnect Brocade 300 Fabric OS Administrator's Guide v7.1.0 - Page 276

10 Logical switch overview This chapter describes the logical switch and logical fabric features. For information about device sharing with Virtual Fabrics, refer to "FC-FC routing and Virtual Fabrics" on page 606. For information about supported switches and port types, refer to "Supported platforms for Virtual Fabrics" on page 286. Virtual Fabrics and Admin Domains are mutually exclusive and are not supported at the same time on a switch. NOTE A note on terminology: Virtual Fabrics is the name of the suite of features. A logical fabric is a type of fabric that you can create using the Virtual Fabrics suite of features. Logical switch overview Traditionally, each switch and all the ports in the switch act as a single Fibre Channel switch (FC switch) that participates in a single fabric. The logical switch feature allows you to divide a physical chassis into multiple fabric elements. Each of these fabric elements is referred to as a logical switch. Each logical switch functions as an independent self-contained FC switch. NOTE Each chassis can have multiple logical switches. Default logical switch To use the Virtual Fabrics features, you must first enable Virtual Fabrics on the switch. Enabling Virtual Fabrics creates a single logical switch in the physical chassis. This logical switch is called the default logical switch, and it initially contains all of the ports in the physical chassis. Figure 17 shows a switch before and after enabling Virtual Fabrics. In this example, the switch has 10 ports, labeled P0 through P9. Before enabling Virtual Fabrics After enabling Virtual Fabrics Physical chassis P0 P3 P6 P9 P1 P4 P7 P2 P5 P8 Physical chassis Default logical switch P0 P3 P6 P9 P1 P4 P7 P2 P5 P8 FIGURE 17 Switch before and after enabling Virtual Fabrics 276 Fabric OS Administrator's Guide 53-1002745-02