Cisco MDS 9000 Series Troubleshooting Guide

Send comments to mdsfeedback-doc@cisco.com.
1-18
Cisco MDS 9000 Family Troubleshooting Guide
OL-5183-02, Cisco MDS SAN-OS Release 1.3
Chapter 1 Troubleshooting Overview
Using Cisco Network Management Products
Using Cisco Network Management Products
This section describes network management tools that are available from Cisco and are useful for
troubleshooting problems with Cisco MDS 9000 Family switches and connected devices. It includes the
following topics:
• Cisco MDS 9000 Port Analyzer Adapter, page 1-18
• Cisco Fabric Analyzer, page 1-19
• CiscoWorks RME, page 1-21
Cisco MDS 9000 Port Analyzer Adapter
The Cisco MDS 9000 Port Analyzer Adapter is a stand-alone adapter card that converts Fibre Channel
(FC) frames to Ethernet frames by encapsulating each Fibre Channel frame into an Ethernet frame. This
product is meant to be used for analyzing SPAN traffic from a Fibre channel port on a Cisco MDS 9000
Family switch.
The Cisco Port Analyzer Adapter provides two physical interfaces:
• An FC interface that connects to the SPAN port of a Cisco MDS 9000 Family switch
• A 100/1000 Mb/s Ethernet port that forwards the encapsulated Fibre Channel traffic with a broadcast
destination MAC Address
Note The Cisco Port Analyzer Adapter does not support half-duplex mode and for this reason, it will not work
when connected to a hub.
The Cisco Port Analyzer Adapter provides the following features:
• Encapsulates FC frames into Ethernet frames
• Sustains 32 max size FC frames burst (in 100 Mb/s mode)
• Line rate at 1Gb/s (for FC frames bigger than 91bytes)
• 64KBytes of onboard frame buffer
• Configurable option for Truncating FC frames to 256 Bytes - for greater burst
• Configurable option for Deep Truncating FC frames to 64 Bytes - best frames burst
• Configurable option for Ethernet Truncating FC frames to 1496 Bytes - max size E-net frames
• Configurable option for No Truncate Mode - sends jumbo frames on E-net side.
• Packet Counter (Indicates number of previous packet drops)
• SOF/EOF type information embedded
• 100/1000 Mb/s Ethernet interface - option on board
• Auto Configuration on power up
• Fibre Channel and Ethernet Link up indicator - LEDs.
• Checks FC frame CRC

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