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IBM Broadcom Brocade SAN Fabric OS v10

By Ilja Donnellan posted 4 hours ago

Brocade released the SAN operating system Fabric OS v10 on 2025-09-22.

Following the launch of IBM's 64-Gbps-capable Gen.7 G720 switches and X7-4 & X7-8 directors in November 2020,
with IBM SAN128B-7 in mid-2022, the family was completed with the small SAN24B-7 switch later this year.

The following restrictions apply to the latter two: neither encryption nor compression are available.
IBM SAN128B-7 is only offered with initial 64-Gbps SFP bundles, but individual additional SFPs with 32 Gbps are available, which make older devices with 8 Gbps (often tape drives) connectable.
IBM SAN24B-7 only offers a single power supply, as in Gen.6.

Now the new 128 Gbps-capable G820 and directors X8-4 and X8-8 are expected to be available.

What needs to be done to prepare your SAN for smooth transition to co-exist and migrate in the future?

At present, you are unlikely to want to use v10.0.0.0 in production environments, as there are probably still a few fixes for stability and usability to be discovered by other users before Brocade declares a “target path”: a release that has not caused any critical problems for users for a long time and is recommended for general use.
For target path releases, there are distinct recommendations for Fibre Channel and FICON protocols, which makes it difficult to use both concurrently on the same production device for years.

Although Broadcom has approved v10 for Gen.7 devices, it is not yet available for download via the Broadcom Assist Portal,
which you can access through IBM Fix Central with your IBM ID, IBM machine type (e.g. 8960) and IBM serial number.

Support for v9.0 was already withdrawn on 2025-04-30, and the same is planned for v9.1 on 2025-12-30.

Existing systems should therefore be upgraded to the latest and only downloadable v9.1 (v9.1.1d7 from April 2025) if possible and/or upgraded to v9.2 in the near future.
For v9.2, v9.2.0c3 is particularly suitable as it is considered as a target path for both FCP and FICON,
or v9.2.1b as a particularly long-supported target path for open systems.

Fabric OS updates to v9.2 are possible during operations from v8.2 via v9.0 via v9.1.
The intermediate step v9.1 can be omitted in the case of a disruptive upgrade from v9.0.

Fabric OS v10 can generally be operated in a fabric with devices from v9.1 onwards.
For older systems, a special “access gateway” configuration still allows limited interoperability.

Since v9.1 will only be supported by Broadcom till end of 2025, the general recommendation remains to update to v9.2 now.

While v9.0 already blocks the plain text http protocol when an https certificate is imported, and v9.2 no longer activates http for new installations, it is no longer available for use with v10.

Other older protocols that are no longer available are non-authenticated snmp, ftp, telnet, RADIUS, TACACS+, and insecure syslog. Secure smtp, although available before, now requires CA certificates.

If insecure protocols are still being used, they should already be converted to newer, secure variants in the v9 environment so that they will continue to function after upgrading to v10.

SANnav should also be updated to v3 beforehand.

During the upgrade, stored scripts are deleted, and root access is no longer available with v10.

In v10, new (logical) switches no longer have the default AllAccess zoning setting, which has already been “tested” for FICON environments in the field due to a bug in v9.2.0a to 9.2.0c.

Concurrent upgrades are possible from v9.2.2 or higher.