HP H-series Enterprise Fabric Management Suite Software - Manual (Page 49)

HP StorageWorks 8/20q and SN6000 Fibre Channel Switch Enterprise Fabric Management Suite User Guide 49
3 Managing Fabric Zoning
NOTE: If you are using Simple SAN Connection Manager (SSCM), it is recommended that you use the
single initiator zoning that SSCM configures automatically. This chapter is for administrators who are not
using SSCM, or who want to do custom 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.
• WWN entries define zone membership by the World Wide Name of the attached device. With this
membership method, you can move WWN member devices to different switch ports in different zones
without having to edit the member entry as you would with a domain ID/port number member. Unlike
FCID members, WWN zone members are not affected by changes in the fabric that could change the
Fibre Channel address of an attached device.
• FCID entries define zone membership by the Fibre Channel address of the attached device. With this
membership method you can replace a device on the same port without having to edit the member
entry as you would with a WWN member.
• Domain ID/Port number entries define zone membership by switch domain ID and port number. All
devices attached to the specified port become members of the zone. The specified port must be an
F_Port or an FL_Port.
Aliases
To make it easier to add a group of ports or devices to one or more zones, you can create an alias. An
alias is a named set of ports or devices that are grouped together for convenience. Unlike a zone, an alias
imposes no communication restrictions between its members. You can add an alias to one or more zones.
However, you cannot add a zone to an alias, nor can an alias be a member of another alias.
Zone sets
A zone set is a named group of zones. A zone can be a member of more than one zone set. Each switch
in the fabric maintains its own zoning database containing one or more zone sets. This zoning database