A Brocade firmware upgrade once in a while is highly recommended: new releases usually squash bugs and add new features, which helps with a stable and efficient SAN infrastructure. The upgrade process itself is relatively straightforward if you keep in mind that you can only non-disruptively upgrade one major release at a time. With that knowledge you only need a FTP server (like Filezilla), SSH client (PuTTY), the upgrade packages and some patience.
Brocade
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Last weekend we replaced six old Brocade SAN switches with brand new Cisco MDS 9148 switches. Everything went according to plan with no disruption to the rest of the infrastructure. I was however stuck with a bunch of old Brocade 4900 switches ready to be decommissioned. Performing a Brocade reset to factory default settings proved to be a bit of a challenge though…
If you ask Google how to perform a Brocade reset to factory default settings, you’ll find a lot of commands. One command removes the zoning, another command removes a different part of the config, a third command replaces some config values with the default settings. However, none of these commands reset the IP configuration, user passwords or switch name. Which is kind of awkward since that’s THE part of the switch config you wouldn’t want to become public domain…