59266-01 B 4-1
4 Managing Fabric Zoning
Zoning a fabric enables you to divide the ports and devices of the fabric into zones
for more efficient and secure communication among functionally grouped nodes.
This chapter describes zoning concepts and how to configure and manage fabric
zoning.
Zoning Concepts
The following zoning concepts provide some context for the zoning tasks
described in this chapter.
Zones
Zoning divides the fabric for the purpose of controlling discovery and inbound
traffic. A zone is a named group of ports or devices. Members of the same zone
can communicate with each other and transmit outside the zone, but cannot
receive inbound traffic from outside the zone. Zoning is hardware-enforced only
when a port/device is a member of no more than eight zones whose combined
membership does not exceed 64. If this condition is not satisfied, that port
behaves as a soft zone member.
Zoning is hardware enforced on a switch port if the sum of the logged-in devices
plus the devices zoned with devices on that port is 64 or less. If a port exceeds
this sum, that port behaves as a soft zone member, which means the zone can
automatically discover and communicate freely with all other member of the same
zone. The port continues to behave as a soft zone member until the sum of
logged-in and zoned devices falls back to 64, and the port is reset.
A zone can be a component of more than one zone set. Several zone sets can be
defined for a fabric, but only one zone set can be active at one time. The active
zone set determines the zoning of the fabric.
Membership in a zone can be defined by device WWN, device FCID, or switch
domain ID and port number.
To Next Page
Loading...
Need help?
General
