How to remove a brocade switch from Fabric

There are different situations you will be encountering on your daily operations. There could be a chance that the switch is beyond its capacity or an out of support model. otherwise, you may be trying to build a new fabric using least used switches in an existing fabric.
On either situations, the removal process of Brocade switches from an existing fabric is fairly same.

All that you have to do is to follow a step by step approach

1, Disable/Remove the ISLs to the switch which you want to remove
2, disconnect/migrate the cable to new switch
3, disable the switch and clear the configuration.

Lets see how can we do that!

if the switch is no longer used by any hosts or storage arrays, make sure you don't have any cables plugged in to any ports. the other step is to isolate the switch from active fabric. To do that, you can
disable the ISLs(disable the E ports)

to disable the switch, issue the command as below

SANSW01:admin> switchdisable

Once the switch is disabled, you can disable the configuration which is presently active on the switch(this step must be followed if you are going to reuse the switch). To disable an active configuration, run command as below

SANSW01:admin> cfgdisable
You are about to disable zoning configuration. This
action will disable any previous zoning configuration enabled.
Do you want to disable zoning configuration? (yes, y, no, n): [no] y
Updating flash ...

After disabling the configuration, next step is to clear the configuration so that you wont face any issues while building a new fabric. To do that issue the command as below.

SANSW01:admin> cfgclear
The Clear All action will clear all Aliases, Zones, FA Zones
and configurations in the Defined configuration.
cfgSave may be run to close the transaction or cfgTransAbort
may be run to cancel the transaction.
Do you really want to clear all configurations?  (yes, y, no, n): [no] y

Once configuration is cleared, now its time to save the settings, run the command as indicated below

SANSW01:admin> cfgsave
You are about to save the Defined zoning configuration. This
action will only save the changes on Defined configuration.
Any changes made on the Effective configuration will not
take effect until it is re-enabled.
Do you want to save Defined zoning configuration only?  (yes, y, no, n): [no] y
Updating flash ...

its Done! now your switch is free from configuration and can be used for building a new fabric.

SANSW01:admin> cfgshow
Defined configuration:
 no configuration defined

How to Enable Bottleneck detection feature in Brocade

Brocade has introduced a new Bottleneck detection feature in Brocade FOS v6.3.0 onwards.  The important thing to notice is that this feature doesn't require a license and supported on 4 Gbps, 8 Gbps, and 16 Gbps platforms. Bottleneck detection feature Monitors and reports latency and congestion bottlenecks on F_Ports and E_Ports. FOS v6.4.0 release introduced enhancements to improve the functionality of detecting device latency. 

Let's see how to enable it!

To check the status of the feature, whether it is enabled or disabled, you have to issue the command as below.

SANSW01:admin> bottleneckmon --status

Bottleneck detection - Disabled

To enable bottleneck monitoring  on  a  switch  with  alerts using  default  values for threshold and time, you have issue the command as below

SANSW01:admin> bottleneckmon --enable -alert

If the command is used without any detection parameters, default thresholds will be applied.The  congestion and Latency thresholds are expressed as a fraction between 0 and 1. The default value for congestion threshold is 0.8 and for latency, default value is 0.1
Setting a latency threshold of 0.1 and a time window of 300 seconds specifies that an alert should be  sent, when  10%  of  the  one-second samples over any period of 300 seconds were affected by latency bottleneck conditions.
Once bottleneck monitoring is enabled on a switch and -alert is  specified, if the ports on  the  configured  switch  experience latency  or congestion the  command  triggers  an SNMP alert

To fine tune the feature, --config operands is used along with following parameters,

-cthresh   Specifies  the severity threshold for congestion that triggers an alert.   The threshold indicates the percentage of one-second intervals affected  by  the  bottleneck  condition within the specified time window. 

-lthresh Specifies  the severity threshold for latency that triggers an alert. The  threshold  indicates  the percentage of one-second intervals affected by the bottleneck  condition  within the  specified  time window. 
-time Specifies  the  time  window  in seconds over which the bottleneck  conditions  is  computed and compared with the threshold. The default is 300 seconds.

-qtime Specifies  the  minimum  number  of   seconds  between  consecutive  alerts.  The default is 300 seconds. 


Eg:-
SANSW01:admin> bottleneckmon --config -alert -lthresh .2 -cthresh .9 -time 300 

To check the status
SANSW01:admin> bottleneckmon --status

Bottleneck detection - Enabled
==============================
Switch-wide sub-second latency bottleneck criterion:
====================================================
Time threshold                 - 0.800
Severity threshold             - 50.000
Switch-wide alerting parameters:
================================
Alerts                         - Yes
Latency threshold for alert    - 0.200
Congestion threshold for alert - 0.900A
veraging time for alert       - 300 seconds
Quiet time for alert           - 300 seconds

To display the number of ports affected by bottleneck conditions issue the command as below:

SANSW01:admin> bottleneckmon --show

To disable bottleneck monitoring on all ports in a chassis:

SANSW01:admin> bottleneckmon --disable
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