Configuring the Fabric Over the Management Interface

Fabric configuration information can be exchanged over the network through in-band communication. However, occasional disruption to in-band traffic occurs due to factors such as network re-convergence, port flapping, power system transients, and other events. Therefore, an alternative method is to configure fabric communication over the management interface for a dedicated communication channel.

This can be achieved while creating the fabric, for example:

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

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

When you configure the fabric communication over the management interface, all fabric communication stays on the management network, except the following types of packets:

• Cluster synchronization-related messages and cluster keep-alive packets sent over the in-band interface.
• The fabric advertisements such as fabric keep-alive packets and global-discovery packets are controlled by fabric-advertisement-network, which is configured while creating or modifying a fabric.

While fabric-related communication such as transactions, notifications, file system replication messages, and other communications can be configured to be sent over the management network, for consistency, it is recommended to use the same management network for other purposes or communication types such as network status updates and forwarded packets, collectively referred to as control network and fabric advertisements.

The fabric-create command allows you to select the transmission medium for other traffic types using specific parameters named control-network and fabric-advertisement-network:

CLI (network-admin@switch) > fabric-create name MyFabric [fabric-network in-band|mgmt] [control-network in-band|mgmt] [fabric-advertisement-network inband-mgmt|inband-only|mgmt-only]