Access Gateway mode in Brocade explained

for beginners
I am a SAN Engineer for a leading storage vendor. The purpose of this article is to provide you a
brief understanding on AG Mode in Brocade, the content is very basic and can be used as a
reference.
Brocade Access Gateway is a FOS feature and it lets us configure an F port as N port. This
reduces the number of domains. When an F port is configured as N port it increases the number
of device ports that we can connect to a single fabric. When access gateway is configured on the
switch the F ports connects as N ports on the fabric instead of E Ports. Switches in AG Mode are
logically transparent to hosts and fabric. We can increase the number of hosts without increasing
the switch. This simplifies configuration and management in a large fabric by reducing the
number of domains and ports.
In simple terms we can call a switch in AG mode as multiplexer because its many to one.

The following features are not available in AG Mode:

FCAL

Fabric Manager

FICON

IP over FC

ISL Trunking

Extended Fabrics

Management Platform services

Name services (SNS)

Port Mirroring

SMI-S

Zoning

The following features are available in AG Mode

RABC features

Admin Domains

Advanced performance monitoring

Direct connection to SAN target

The following are the major difference between a Fabric OS switch in native mode and a Fabric
OS switch in AG mode,

FOS switch in native mode is a part of the fabric and can connect only
to FOS fabric only. It uses many physical ports for ISL connectivity and
consumes fabric resources.
AG is outside the fabric, it reduces the number of switches in fabric
and number of ports. We can connect switch in AG mode to any fabric,
meaning it can interoperate with different typed of fabric regardless of
vendor.

Ports in AG mode:
F Port Fabric port that connects a host or a storage device to a switch in AG mode
N Port Node port that connects a switch in AG mode to fabric as F Port.
Steps to enable AG Mode:
When enabling AG mode some configuration information like zoning and others will be deleted
from switch so perform a configupload to backup the configuration.
#configupload
Ensure that switch is in native mode 0. To learn about various interop modes
click here
#switchshow - If the interop mode is anything other than 0 change it to 0 by
issuing command #interopmode 0
#switchdisable - this syntax will disable all the ports in switch and will not
participate in I/O
#ag --modeenable - Now switch will reboot and come back in AG mode with
default port mapping
#switchshow - We can confirm the switch mode in this command and it will also
show us the ports configured as N and F ports

To disable AG Mode,
#disableswitch
#ag --modedisable