Cisco MDS 9000 Series Troubleshooting Guide

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

Cisco MDS 9000 Series Specifications

General

Category	Switch
Operating System	Cisco NX-OS
Ports	Varies by model
Protocols	Fibre Channel (FC), Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP), iSCSI
Redundancy	Redundant supervisors, power supplies, and fans
Management	Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM), CLI, SNMP
Virtualization Support	VSANs (Virtual SANs)
Security Features	Fibre Channel Security Protocol (FC-SP)
Hot Swappable Components	power supplies, fans
Power Supply Options	AC and DC options available