Back-up/Restore Brocade Switch Configurations

Brocade switches have become one of the most widely deployed componets in most Storage Area Networks (SANs). One thing that has led to Brocade’s success is their robust CLI, which allow you to view and modify almost every aspect of their switch. This includes zoning configurations, SNMP attributes, domain ids, switch names and network addresses, etc. All of this configuration information is necessary for the switch to function properly, and should be periodically backed up to allow speedy recovery when disaster hits.

Each Brocade switch comes with the “configUpload” and “configDownload” commands to back up a switch configuration to a remote system, or to restore a configuration from a remote system.

ConfigUplaod has two modes of oepration: Interactive mode and Automatic mode.

To use the interactive mode to upload a config from a switch named switch1 to an ftp server with the IP address 192.1.2.3, configUpload can be run to walk you through backing up the configuration:

switch:admin> configupload

Protocol (scp or ftp) [ftp]: ftp

Server Name or IP Address [host]: 192.1.2.3

User Name [user]: VARGHC

File Name [config.txt]: switch1_config.txt

Password: xxxxx

configUpload complete: All config parameters are uploaded.

 

After the configuration is uploaded, you will have a text file with you switches configuration on the remove server:

$ ls -l sw*

-rw-r--r--   1 VARGHC    other       7342 Jul  7 09:15 switch1_config.txt

To restore a configuration, you can use the configDownload command. Both of these commands allow the paramters to be passed as arguments to the script, so they are ideal for automation (there is a backup script on the Brocade support site that can be used to automate configuration backups).