Changing VSAN ID and FCoE VLAN ID

[its-infra]

Currently our VSAN ID and FCoE VLAN ID are exactly the same, 1.  In order to update the firmware on our fabric interconnects, I need to change one or the other with the FCoE VLAN ID being the most likely choice.  When our VSAN was created in UCSM, it was created as 1 shared VSAN rather than one VSAN for fabric A and another for fabric B.  I was told that if I change the FCoE VLAN ID, it's going to cause a short blip due to the way the VSAN was created.  Has this ever happened to anyone and if so, what was your experience?  How long of an outage can I expect from this change?

[Walter Dey]

There are misc. aspects that you should consider

- Vlan 1 and Vsan 1 should never be used for any operational purposes (eg. caveats with disjoint vlans)

- Same vlan should be defined in both fabric a and b (nic teaming !)

- vsan's should be different for fabric a and b; a cable connecting fabric a and b will not result in a fabric merge, and therefore a possible disaster

- FCoE vlans for vsan #x are best placed with a high offset + #x

As you said, changing the FCoE vlan is disruptive, link initialization, flogi... have to be done; usually a OS should survive such a short interrupt.

However, changing the Vsan # might also require zoning changes (if you use fc alias which are per vsan; device alias are global, and therefore don't have this problem).

Changing vsan # might also require a modification of the FI FC uplink ports

Good luck