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35-7
Cisco MDS 9000 Family Fabric Manager Configuration Guide
OL-6965-03, Cisco MDS SAN-OS Release 2.x
Chapter 35 Troubleshooting Your Fabric
Configuring a Fabric Analyzer
Configuring a Fabric Analyzer
Fibre Channel protocol analyzers capture, decode, and analyze frames and ordered sets on a link.
Existing Fibre Channel analyzers can capture traffic at wire rate speed. They are expensive and support
limited frame decoding. Also, to snoop traffic, the existing analyzers disrupt the traffic on the link while
the analyzer is inserted into the link.
Cisco has brought protocol analysis within a storage network to a new level with the Cisco Fabric
Analyzer. You can capture Fibre Channel control traffic from a switch and decode it without having to
disrupt any connectivity, and without having to be local to the point of analysis.
The Cisco Fibre Channel protocol analyzer is based on two popular public-domain software
applications:
• libpcap—See http://www.tcpdump.org.
• Ethereal—See http://www.ethereal.com.
Note The Cisco Fabric Analyzer is useful in capturing and decoding control traffic, not data traffic. It is
suitable for control path captures, and is not intended for high-speed data path captures.
This section explains the following topics:
• About the Cisco Fabric Analyzer, page 35-7
• Configuring the Cisco Fabric Analyzer, page 35-9
• Displaying Captured Frames, page 35-10
About the Cisco Fabric Analyzer
The Cisco Fabric Analyzer comprises of two separate components (see Figure 35-1):
• Software that runs on the Cisco MDS 9000 Family switch and supports two modes of capture:
–
A text-based analyzer that supports local capture and decodes captured frames
–
A daemon that supports remote capture
• GUI-based client that runs on a host that supports libpcap such as Windows or Linux and
communicates with the remote capture daemon in a Cisco MDS 9000 Family switch.