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27-4
Cisco MDS 9000 Family Fabric Manager Configuration Guide
OL-17256-03, Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 4.x
Chapter 27 SAN Device Virtualization
Configuring SDV
• Secondary device—The additional device that is configured. By default, the secondary device is
standby.
• Active device—The device that is currently virtualized is called the active device. By default, the
primary device becomes the active device if it is online. The active device is indicated by a (*)
symbol.
Automatic Failover and Fallback
As of Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 4.1(1a), SAN device virtualization supports automatic failover and
fallback configurations for the virtual devices. In all of the earlier releases, when there was a failure, you
needed to manually configure the device as primary to make it active. With the introduction of automatic
failover and fallback configurations, the active device is distinguished from the primary device indicated
by a (*) symbol.
• Auto failover—When there is a failure, the failover auto attribute automatically shuts down the
primary device and brings up the secondary device to active state. When the primary device comes
back online, it requires user intervention to switchover.
• Auto failover with fallback—In addition to automatic failover, when the primary device comes back
online after a failover, the primary device is brought to active state and the secondary device moved
to standby state.
Configuring SDV
SDV is a distributed service and uses Cisco Fabric Services (CFS) distribution to synchronize the
databases. When you configure SDV, it starts a CFS session and locks the fabric. When a fabric is locked,
Cisco NX-OS software does not allow any configuration changes from a switch other than the switch
holding the lock–and issues a message to inform users about the locked status. Configuration changes
are held in a pending database for the application. You must perform a commit operation to make the
configuration active and to release the lock for all switches.
See Chapter 13, “Using the CFS Infrastructure” for more details about CFS,
Note When you enable SDV, CFS distribution is also enabled; CFS distribution cannot be disabled for SDV.
The following sections describe how to configure SDV:
• Configuring a Virtual Device, page 27-4
• Linking a Virtual Device with a Physical Device, page 27-7
• Resolving Fabric Merge Conflicts, page 27-8
Configuring a Virtual Device
A virtual device is identified by an alphanumeric name of up to 32 characters and defines all the real
devices (one primary and one or more secondary) that it represents. Upon the successful creation of a
virtual device, the virtual device name is internally registered as the device alias name with the device
alias database; the pWWN is automatically assigned by the system using Cisco Organizational Unique
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