Dell PowerConnect B-DCX-4s User's Guide download pdf (Page 14)

2 Flow Vision Administrator’s Guide

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Flows

A flow is a set of Fibre Channel (FC) frames or packets that share similar traits, such as an ingress

port or egress port identifier or any other data that can be used to differentiate one set of related

frames or packets from a different set. These parameters are specified as part of the flow

command, and include:

• Port parameters: (also called the Point of Interest, or where the data you want to examine is

from) This consists of an ingress port (ingrport) or an egress port (egrport). Only one can be

specified when defining a flow.

• Frame parameters: These are the following parameters: Source Device Identification (SID or

WWN), Destination Device Identification (DID or WWN), LUN, or frame type. At least one frame

parameter must be present to define a flow. Refer to Table 3 on page 4 for details on frame types.

• Direction: A direction is implicitly defined from an ingress port to an egress port, or a source

device (srcdev) to a destination device (dstdev). For example, srcdev=x, dstdev=y indicates

traffic flowing from x to y. The -bidir option causes the flow definition to be monitored in both

directions. This makes the following true:

- Entering srcdev=x dstdev=y specifies that only traffic flowing from x to y is the desired flow.

- Entering srcdev=x dstdev=y -bidir specifies that traffic travelling from x to y and traffic

travelling from y to x are both desired flows.

Figure 1 illustrates how the frame and port parameters apply to a flow.

FIGURE 1 Frame and port parameters

Flow definitions

To define a flow and configure Flow Vision to monitor that flow, you must provide a unique flow

name and specify the flow parameters. These parameters identify the sets of related frames and

can either be explicitly defined or Flow Vision can learn them through observation.

Flow definitions are stored on the switch on which the flow is created, and are not distributed

across the fabric. This means that each switch knows only its own flows and does not know what

flows exist on other switches.

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Dell PowerConnect B-DCX-4s User's Guide Page 14