> # About Enabling In-Order Delivery

> You can enable the in-order delivery feature for a specific VSAN or for the entire switch. By default, in-order delivery is disabled on switches in the Cisco MDS 9000 Family.

> Tip We recommend that you only enable this feature when devices that cannot handle any out-of-order frames are present in the switch. Load-balancing algorithms within the Cisco MDS 9000 Family ensure that frames are delivered in order during normal fabric operation. The load-balancing algorithms based on source FC ID, destination FC ID, and exchange ID are enforced in hardware without any performance degradation. However, if the fabric encounters a failure and this feature is enabled, the recovery will be delayed because of an intentional pausing of fabric forwarding to purge the fabric of resident frames that could potentially be forwarded out-of-order.

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