Rebalancing an encryption engine, Master keys – Brocade Fabric OS Encryption Administrator’s Guide Supporting RSA Data Protection Manager (DPM) Environments (Supporting Fabric OS v7.2.0) User Manual
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Fabric OS Encryption Administrator’s Guide (DPM)
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Master keys
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During rebalancing operations, be aware of the following:
•
You might notice a slight disruption in Disk I/O. In some cases, manual intervention may be
needed.
•
Backup jobs to tapes might need to be restarted after rebalancing is completed.
To determine if rebalancing is recommended for an encryption engine, check the encryption engine
properties. Beginning with Fabric OS 6.4, a field is added that indicates whether or not rebalancing
is recommended.
You might be prompted to rebalance during the following operations:
•
When adding a new disk or tape target container.
•
When removing an existing disk or tape target container.
•
After failover to a backup encryption engine in an HA cluster.
•
After a failed encryption engine in an HA cluster is recovered, and failback processing has
occurred.
Rebalancing an encryption engine
To rebalance an encryption engine, complete the following steps:
1. Select Configure > Encryption from the menu task bar to display the Encryption Center
dialog box. (Refer to
2. Select an engine, then select Engine > Re-Balance from the menu task bar.
A warning message displays, noting the potential disruption of disk and tape I/O, and that the
operation may take several minutes.
3. Click Yes to begin rebalancing.
Master keys
Master keys belong to the group and are managed from Group Properties.
When an opaque key vault is used, a master key is used to encrypt the data encryption keys. The
master key status indicates whether a master key is used and whether it has been backed up.
Encryption is not allowed until the master key has been backed up.
Only the active master key can be backed up, and multiple backups are recommended. You can
back up or restore the master key to the key vault, to a file, or to a recovery card set. A recovery
card set is set of smart cards. Each recovery card holds a portion of the master key. The cards must
be gathered and read together from a card reader attached to a PC running Brocade Network
Advisor to restore the master key.
Although it is generally not necessary to create a new master key, you might be required to create
one due to the following:
•
The previous master key has been compromised.
•
Corporate policy might require a new master key every year for security purposes.