Cisco MDS 9000 Series

CHAPTER
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Cisco MDS 9000 Family Troubleshooting Guide
OL-5183-02, Cisco MDS SAN-OS Release 1.3
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Troubleshooting Overview
This chapter introduces the basic concepts, methodology, and tools to use for troubleshooting problems
that may occur when configuring and using a Cisco MDS 9000 Family switch. The two most common
symptoms of problems occurring in a storage network are:
• A host not accessing its allocated storage
• An application not responding after attempting to access the allocated storage
To identify the possible problems, you need to use a variety of tools and understand the overall storage
environment. For this reason, this chapter describes a number of general troubleshooting tools and
procedures in addition to those that are specific to the Cisco MDS 9000 family. This chapter also
provides a plan of attack for investigating storage issues. Refer to the other chapters in this book for
detailed explanations of specific issues.
This chapter includes the following sections:
• Introduction, page 1-1
• Contacting Customer Support, page 1-3
• Using Host Diagnostic Tools, page 1-3
• Using Cisco MDS 9000 Family Tools, page 1-4
• Using Cisco Network Management Products, page 1-18
• Using Other Troubleshooting Products, page 1-22
Introduction
Some basic questions should be answered before you go into too much detail about specific problems
and solutions. A process of elimination can determine which network components have been subject to
change and therefore may be the cause of your problems. The main steps you should follow to identify
a problem in a SAN environment include:
1. Verify physical connectivity and registration to the fabric
2. Verify storage subsystem and server configuration
3. Verify end-to-end connectivity and fabric configuration
This section provides a series of questions that may be useful when troubleshooting a problem with a
Cisco MDS 9000 family switch or connected devices. Use the answers to these questions to plan a course
of action and to determine the scope of the problem. For example, if a host can only see some of the