Configuring the Fabric Over the Management Interface

Fabric configuration information can be exchanged over the network through in-band communication. However, in case of Virtual Wire configuration, that type of communication is not available. Therefore, the fabric has to be configured over the management interface.

When a fabric is configured to use the management ports of the switches, its management communication has to rely on a dedicated external management network that interconnects the management ports. For this reason, it is said to happen “out-of-band” (i.e., outside of the front-panel port connectivity, also known as “in-band” connectivity). Redundancy is required in the dedicated external management network to guarantee fabric service continuity in case of external network failure.

Configuration over the management interface can be achieved when a fabric is created via the fabric-create command. The user must specify that all fabric communication occur over the management interface like so:

CLI (network-admin@switch) > fabric-create name MyFabric control-network mgmt fabric-network mgmt fabric-advertisement-network mgmt-only

When you create a fabric over the management interface, any other node joining the fabric inherits this setting. In other words, all nodes within the same fabric communicate through the same network type with fabric peers. (You cannot have mixed fabric configurations using both management interfaces and in-band communication.)

Therefore, Netvisor ONE does not display fabrics over an incompatible networks when you execute the fabric-join command. This prevents a switch from joining an incompatible fabric.