Knowledge Base

bfaConfig

Supported hardware and/or software

Brocade adapter models 415, 425, 804, 815, 825, 1010, 1020, 1007, 1741, and 1860.

Plan for Supporting the vSphere 5.0 ESXi Architecture

The Brocade Host Profile plug-in works along with BCU tool, which is a prerequisite. Install BCU tool before installing Host Profile plug-in.

On ESXi 5.0 systems, Host Profile plug-in runs in the ESXi user world environment.

Use Case

In a large deployment of Brocade adapters in a fabric, configuring and managing the adapters is made easy using the Brocade Host Profile plug-in.

The plug-in is useful in a large deployment of Brocade adapters with identical hardware configuration where the hardware path of all the adapters in all the servers is the same. This means that all of the servers should have equal number of Brocade adapters and are of identical card types in exact same PCI slots in each server.

In the above mentioned scenario, one server in the fabric is configured and the configuration is extracted and saved at the vCenter Server. This configuration may be referred to as gold configuration. The gold configuration may be attached to the rest of the servers to apply the configuration and to apply during the server reboot.

When a reference host or server is configured, this is the process to attach and apply a Host Profile:

1. The administrator manually initiates the extraction of configuration details from a specific ESXi host, called the reference host because it has already been configured.
2. The vCenter Server retrieves and encapsulates the configuration settings of the reference host into a description for use as a template to configure other hosts. This is the host profile. These settings are stored in the vCenter Server database and can be exported into the VMware profile format (.vpf).
3. The host profile can be attached to a particular host or cluster. At this time the configuration of the host or cluster is checked for compliance against the host profile. For vSphere 5.0, administrators can create rules for Stateless ESXi hosts, where the host profile is applied automatically at boot time.
4. After the host profile is attached to a set of hosts or cluster, vCenter Server monitors the configuration settings of the attached entities and detects deviations from the golden configuration encapsulated by the host profile.
5. If it detects a deviation, vCenter Server determines the configuration that should apply to a host or cluster. To bring non‐compliant hosts back to the desired state, the vCenter Server agents apply a host profile by passing the host configuration change commands to the ESXi host through the vSphere API. The terminology for this step is either Apply or Remediate (remediate is the term used by Update Manager).

Configuration parameters affected

These parameters are retrieved and saved by the plug-in during extract and apply operations from vCenter Server. More information on these parameters are available in the user guide.

• Port level Configuration Parameters:
  • Authentication parameters such as – secret key, hash function (md5, sha1, ms, sm), authentication policy enable / disable.
  • Logging level
  • Port enable / disable
  • Port topology
  • Port speed
  • Port receive data field size
  • Path TOV
  • QOS enable / disable
  • TRL

• Trunk Configuration:
• • Trunk enable / disable
  • Adapter information on which trunk is configured

Support information

Product documentation is available for download from the web page as the driver package.

You can obtain support by emailing support@brocade.comor by contacting the OEM from which you purchased the Brocade adapter.