HP Cisco MDS 9020 Cisco MDS 9000 Family Fabric Manager Configuration Guide - R - Page 729

Chapter 32 Configuring Fibre Channel Routing Services and Protocols In-Order Delivery Send documentation comments to [email protected] • The new frames are delivered through the new path after the switch latency drop period has elapsed and all old frames are flushed. Frames that cannot be delivered in order through the old path within the switch latency drop period are dropped. See the "Configuring the Drop Latency Time" section on page 32-18. About Enabling In-Order Delivery You can enable the in-order delivery feature for a specific VSAN or for the entire switch. By default, in-order delivery is disabled on switches in the Cisco MDS 9000 Family. Tip We recommend that you only enable this feature when devices that cannot handle any out-of-order frames are present in the switch. Load-balancing algorithms within the Cisco MDS 9000 Family ensure that frames are delivered in order during normal fabric operation. The load-balancing algorithms based on source FC ID, destination FC ID, and exchange ID are enforced in hardware without any performance degradation. However, if the fabric encounters a failure and this feature is enabled, the recovery will be delayed because of an intentional pausing of fabric forwarding to purge the fabric of resident frames that could potentially be forwarded out-of-order. OL-17256-03, Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 4.x Cisco MDS 9000 Family Fabric Manager Configuration Guide 32-17