A storage network engineer is designing a Fibre Channel SAN with two Cisco MDS switches in a single VSAN. The design requires that if one switch fails, the storage traffic continues to flow without manual intervention. Which two technologies should be implemented?
Trap 1: NPV
NPV (N_Port Virtualization) is used to reduce the number of Fibre Channel IDs but does not provide switch-level redundancy.
Trap 2: Port channels
Port channels aggregate multiple physical links into a single logical link, providing link-level redundancy and increased bandwidth, but they do not protect against a complete switch failure. For switch failure resilience, multipathing is required.
Trap 3: VSAN trunking
VSAN trunking allows multiple VSANs to traverse a single ISL, but does not provide path redundancy across switches.
- A
NPV
Why wrong: NPV (N_Port Virtualization) is used to reduce the number of Fibre Channel IDs but does not provide switch-level redundancy.
- B
Port channels
Why wrong: Port channels aggregate multiple physical links into a single logical link, providing link-level redundancy and increased bandwidth, but they do not protect against a complete switch failure. For switch failure resilience, multipathing is required.
- C
VSAN trunking
Why wrong: VSAN trunking allows multiple VSANs to traverse a single ISL, but does not provide path redundancy across switches.
- D
IVR
Why wrong: IVR (Inter-VSAN Routing) enables communication between different VSANs but does not provide automatic failover on switch failure.
- E
Fibre Channel multipathing
Fibre Channel multipathing (e.g., MPIO) allows initiators to use multiple paths to targets across different switches, automatically failing over if a switch or link fails, meeting the requirement of uninterrupted traffic without manual intervention.