San interoperability between MDS and Brocade switches

[cineca]

Hello to the community,

 I'm working on a SAN built by scratch using MDS switches and I need to integrate some brocade switches installed on bladecenters.

At first I decided to built two vsan, one for the "Cisco-only" vsan and one for the interoperable one to overcome limitations due to the interoperability mode.

Then I started configuring a pilot, following this document 

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/mds9000/interoperability/guide/interopgd/ICG_brmc.html

and I discovered that interop mode 1 is the default for Cisco MDS.

What I understand now is that the only real limitation given to Cisco MDS by interoperability is the domain id, and that I can't use port channels, but only towards other vendor switches.

Is this correct? If it is, I suppose I'll use just one vsan.

Thank you very much and regards to all.

Denis

[Walter Dey · Accepted solution]

Hi Denis

my 2c; I would not recommend using any interop mode; interop mode 1 is the classical one, with almost zero Features. 

Are you sure that Brocade still supports  interop mode ? and if yes, how long ?

Your use case: why are you not using Brocade Switches in the blade Chassis with NPV mode, connecting them to MDS in NPIV mode.

This is industry Standard, and works ok

Walter.

[cineca]

Thank you Walter, I didn't think about NPIV, as I am not used to these interop issues.

But now I think I'll try it. Your recommendation sounds good to me.

Denis