OCI 6.4.0 introduces a new device type, "NPV Switch".
Cisco NPV mode / Brocade Access Gateway mode are typically used (often optionally) on edge devices - smaller rack switches, or switch like devices within blade server architecture. They do not participate in FC zoning, but are subject to it. They logically act like a passthrough device to the upsteam fabric - allowing the physically attached hosts to make NPIV logins to the upstream fabric.
OCI 6.4.0 will cease reporting NPIV attached ports as fc1/2-a , and instead, a "hub switch" will be shown in the NPV switch view to represent the devices on that port.
OCI 6.4.0 out of the box will support discovery of Cisco NPV mode devices. HOWEVER, this will not happen automagically - your fabric aware datasource will NOT discover these devices. You will need to create new Cisco datasources, one per NPV device, to discover these devices. These methodology to control the risk of chaos - some customers may have hundreds of these devices on a fabric, so having a fabric aware datasource automatically discover them might make acquisition time for that datasource exceedingly slow.
Note - OCI has a cli method to script the creation of datasources, so if you have > 20 NPV devices you want to discover, pursuing this may be a good idea.
OCI 6.4.0 does not have Brocade Access Gateway support out of the box. However, we are starting a public beta for it - basically, you will be able to deploy a Brocade CLI datasource patch that *will* allow your existing Brocade CLI datasource to discover your AG devices through fabric discovery
Brocade AG and Cisco NPV devices will both appear in the NPV switches view - when "actively" discovered by a datasource, we will know the make/model/firmware of the AG/NPV mode device, and discover all of its ports. In the future, we are looking to support performance collection for these devices' individual ports.
Finally, having the model of NPV mode device in OCI may allow us to create new datasources in the future, for other vendor's edge fabric devices that are not truly FC switches (which in the eyes of OCI, need to participate in zoning, have a domain ID, etc)