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Brocade ICX Series (cheap & powerful 10gbE/40gbE switching)

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tommybackeast

Active Member
Jun 10, 2018
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Question on Best Practices in regards to fully Testing an incoming Brocade 7250-48p Switch.

Currently I have a Brocade 6450-24p but have run out of 1GB ports.

I am a noob; and my question is what CLI commands do I use with the 7250-48p to properly test the Switch.

Is there some CLI Diagnostic command?

I will happily spend the time plugging CAT6 cable into all 48 ports one-by-one if need be. /thank you
 

fohdeesha

Kaini Industries
Nov 20, 2016
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Just got my ICX7150's. From what I remember somewhere I read in this thread, you no longer need to get licenses right? Because they are basically perpetual. Mine did ask me for a 45-day evaluation though. Is that normal?

follow the update guide in the first post which covers all this
 

fohdeesha

Kaini Industries
Nov 20, 2016
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The high sampling rate is just for testing purposes :), the traffic to and from the connected server is about ~100 pps.
In a production environment, i would set it to 256 or 512. The high polling period is because i was looking at the sflow traffic using wireshark as well, and the packets containing interface statistics were quite annoying to filter.
The cpu usage of the switch is below 5 %, while snmp is using 66 % of the cycles, so im outlining heavy cpu usage as the cause of my problem.
I don't mean CPU utilization (I've never really seen sflow raise it significantly regardless of sample rate), but FastIron's built in sample per second limit to avoid clogging up the bus between the ASIC and the CPU. I remember it being something like 50 samples a second, but that may only apply to the ICX7xxx series, I can't remember. It's covered in fastiron-08030p-adminguide.pdf somewhere
 

Smbaker

New Member
Oct 9, 2019
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I will happily spend the time plugging CAT6 cable into all 48 ports one-by-one if need be. /thank you
That's what I started out doing on my 6450-24P. One port at a time I turned on PoE and plugged in a Raspberry Pi with the PoE hat and verified it had power and connectivity. After the first bank of 12 ports, I tired of the pace and just went every 3rd or 4th port or so. It was probably overkill, but I wanted to be pretty sure the PoE wasn't flaky as I'd read a lot of posts here are flaky / damaged PoE boards.
 

tommybackeast

Active Member
Jun 10, 2018
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That's what I started out doing on my 6450-24P. One port at a time I turned on PoE and plugged in a Raspberry Pi with the PoE hat and verified it had power and connectivity. After the first bank of 12 ports, I tired of the pace and just went every 3rd or 4th port or so. It was probably overkill, but I wanted to be pretty sure the PoE wasn't flaky as I'd read a lot of posts here are flaky / damaged PoE boards.
I had not thought of that (turning POE on for each port to confirm POE works on each), thank you.

Might you know of a Brocade CLI command that runs diagnostics on the switch itself?
 

fohdeesha

Kaini Industries
Nov 20, 2016
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I had not thought of that (turning POE on for each port to confirm POE works on each), thank you.

Might you know of a Brocade CLI command that runs diagnostics on the switch itself?
it runs pretty decent diagnostics each boot, that's why if there's POE damage 99% of the time it'll spit out the PoE initialization errors people have posted in here. If you update all the firmware and it boots without complaining you're probably good
 

tommybackeast

Active Member
Jun 10, 2018
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it runs pretty decent diagnostics each boot, that's why if there's POE damage 99% of the time it'll spit out the PoE initialization errors people have posted in here. If you update all the firmware and it boots without complaining you're probably good
thank you - if I am reading your page correctly : for the 7250 the firmware you suggest is Brocade v8080 Firmware/Docu Zip ; SW version: 08080d ; ZIP Updated: 01-22-2019

After spending time this week reading horrible documentation; it is pleasure to read your excellent and clear documentation - thank you.
 
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Eru0194

New Member
Jun 13, 2019
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thank you - if I am reading your page correctly : for the 7250 the firmware you suggest is Brocade v8080 Firmware/Docu Zip ; SW version: 08080d ; ZIP Updated: 01-22-2019

After spending time this week reading horrible documentation; it is pleasure to read your excellent and clear documentation - thank you.
You should probably use the latest version of the 8080 branch, which is currently 08.0.80e.
 

zanechua

Member
May 6, 2016
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follow the update guide in the first post which covers all this
Yeah I already did and noticed that the license command was something along the lines of "perpetual" but it still mentions the 45-day notice when you run the command so was just wondering if it was in fact perpetual. haha.
 

capn13

New Member
Mar 25, 2019
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I have a question about what looks like read errors on the Flash.

Screenie below is from an overnight Minicom session to a 6430-24 (as you might be able to tell from the prompt!).

Should I be worried ? Should I run an fsck at the boot prompt? Pray to @fohdeesha? :)
Brocade_6430_bread_errors.jpg
 

Wolfstar

Active Member
Nov 28, 2015
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Got my ICX6610-24-I in, set up, racked, and configured. Now I gotta take all the things down in order to configure my current ICX6450-24P in a mixed stack, but I'm going to hold off on that. Everyone I'm running game servers for wants to play right now so don't want to get in a fight. :)

I might have asked this before, but has anyone else ever done a mixed stack, with 6610 primary and 6450 in the stack? I've gone over the documentation and don't see a problem with doing it, but I'd like to run the stack, eventually, off of one of the 4x10G breakout ports, and the docs explicitly call out the front 10G links. I'm thinking this is because the breakouts aren't officially supported for anything, or something similar, but if anyone's got an idea, I'd appreciate knowing.
 

infoMatt

Active Member
Apr 16, 2019
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Got my ICX6610-24-I in, set up, racked, and configured. Now I gotta take all the things down in order to configure my current ICX6450-24P in a mixed stack, but I'm going to hold off on that. Everyone I'm running game servers for wants to play right now so don't want to get in a fight. :)

I might have asked this before, but has anyone else ever done a mixed stack, with 6610 primary and 6450 in the stack? I've gone over the documentation and don't see a problem with doing it, but I'd like to run the stack, eventually, off of one of the 4x10G breakout ports, and the docs explicitly call out the front 10G links. I'm thinking this is because the breakouts aren't officially supported for anything, or something similar, but if anyone's got an idea, I'd appreciate knowing.
Yep, @fohdeesha answered a very similar question a couple of days ago, with the correct procedure and commands to use the 40Gbreakout as the stack backbone... try look at the last few pages of this thread ;)
 

Wolfstar

Active Member
Nov 28, 2015
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Search only comes up with a post back in April where he said you can't use anything but the front ports. I'd been reading the last 3-4 pages as it went.
 

Thorzeen

New Member
Jun 15, 2018
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I think this might be the right thread to post this question in,if not please excuse and inform where a more appropriate place would be.

I read in admin user guide for ICX 6610 that one of the limitations of the NTP client and server cannot communicate using hostnames.
I can confirm it will not resolve 0.north-american.pool.ntp.org. If i nslookup the pool domain name i can use one of the IP address it returns just fine.

My question is Is there away around this so i can use the benefits a "pool" has to offer; eg round robin to many servers changing hourly ?

Thanks
 

groove

Member
Sep 21, 2011
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Hello all,

Really need some help here - Just got delivery of a preowned ICX 6610-48P-E from ebay. Thought I'd use the weekend to update the firmware and configure it for network - noobie here using a L3 capable switch - so thought I'd use this switch to accomplish 3 goals at once - upgrade to 10GBE, power up a few POE devices and also learn more about L3 level routing and protocols in general.

Unfortunately, have hit into a snag right on the get-go just upgrading the firmware - at my wits end trying to figure out how to get to the monitor prompt to do a factory reset of the switch - So here's my setup - I have a serial cable connected to the serial io RJ45 port on the switch (IOIOI) to the serial port (DB9) of an X9drd-7ln4f motherboard running a vanilla install of ubuntu 18.04 - server. I am using minicom to communicate with the switch over the serial port. I've configured minicom as follows :

Serial Device : /dev/ttyS0
Lockfile Location : /dev/lock
Bps/Par/Bit : 9600 8N1
Hardware Flow Control : No
Software Flow Control : No

Now here's the issue - No matter what I do - I just can't seem to get the boot process to drop into the boot monitor prompt. I have tried continuously hitting the 'b' key before and through powering up the device, hitting it just after the $ prompt but before the ICX Boot .... displays, right after the Enter 'a' to stop at memory test etc. But somehow I just don't seem to be hitting it at the right time. I've tired this at least 2 dozen times over the past couple of days, but it just does not seem to work.

I'm sure I'm missing something very simple. But I just can't seem to get the timing right - or am I missing something else. Trust me, I'm really embarrassed to be asking for help on something that should be so simple. But at this time I am out of options here and am on the verge to returning the unit as defective because no matter what I do - I can't seem to get to the monitor prompt. I keeps wanting to boot all the way through no matter when I hit the 'b' key. The Boot Code version is 10.1.00 (grz10100).

Please heeellllpppp - getting really desperate.