Optimizing the Cisco MDS PAA with Wireshark

There are actually quite a few more fields, but these are truncated so you do not see all of the FC-SP fields and parameters.  This can hurt your troubleshooting.  In many cases, not all, but most, you really don't care so much about the actual payload data of the FC frame.  What you want is the headers.  DTM will likely cause you some truncation of headers which is bad.  So any mode that you can use that keeps more data than DTM is a good idea in my opinion.  I just goto NTM because that way I know its going to have everything and I am generally not spanning 4GB links anyways, most of what I do is in a controlled lab.  If you can't do NTM, then do ETM, if you can't do ETM do STM and if you have to do DTM.  Make sure if your using FC frames larger than 1496 you use Jumbo Frames on your Ethernet NIC.  Look at the result when we use NTM instead of DTM: