If you’ve read my last Smart Zoning post on Cisco Smart Zoning you should have a good understanding of the how and why of Smart Zoning.  Shortly after that post I being the process of converting two SAN Fabrics from traditional zoning to Smart Zoning.  Cisco has an easy way to convert your traditional zones to a Smart Zone.  The base requirement for doing this is what you have Smart Zoning enabled.  It’s a simply process. # conf t (config)# zone smart-zone enable vsan 100 Smart Zoning distribution initiated. Check zone status. (config)# zone convert smart-zone vsan 100 (config)# zoneset activate name ZoneSet_VSAN100 vsan 100 It’s a simply process, right? All this does it query the FCNS database and marks each Zone Member as either init, target, or both. That is all well and good, but you still have exactly the same number of zones. The whole point of Smart Zoning is to reduce the management complexity byRead More →

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This morning I found myself needing to know what server was attached to each and every port on a large Cisco SAN Fabric. This can be quite the effort if you don’t have excellent documentation.  You can query the fabric login (flogi) database, but that will map a fiber channel port to a wwn.  That’s a start, but unless you have a map of wwn to server, it’s largely ineffective at proving human consumable information.   mds9513# show flogi database ——————————————————————————– INTERFACE VSAN FCID PORT NAME NODE NAME ——————————————————————————– fc1/1 301 0x8a00b0 50:00:09:72:08:3a:81:a7 50:00:09:72:06:3a:80:02 fc1/2 301 0x8a00cb 50:00:14:31:90:6a:79:12 50:00:14:40:45:32:6a:75 fc1/3 301 0x8a00ca 50:00:14:31:90:6a:54:12 50:00:14:40:45:32:6a:54 fc1/6 301 0x8a00cd 50:00:14:31:80:6a:54:02 50:00:14:40:45:22:6a:54 fc1/12 501 0xa50001 50:00:09:72:08:3a:61:e4 50:00:09:72:06:3a:82:00 If you want to see which zones map to the wwpn, you can use the “show zone member <wwn>” command to see a list of all zones associated with the specified wwn: mds9513# show zone member pwwn 10:00:00:00:c7:ca:3b:b8 pwwn 10:00:00:00:c7:ca:3b:b8 vsan 95 zoneRead More →

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For as long as most of us in the Fiber Channel space can recall SAN Zoning has been the base method of controlling access amongst SAN attached devices. A lot of us do this the classic Single Initiator / Single Target zoning – where one Host talks to one Array port.  In a Cisco SAN Fabric we have an easier way.  But first we need to understand why we do single initiator zoning. When a zone is created and an initiator/target pair added permissions are converted to an Access Control Lists (ACL) of Access Control Entities (ACE). The switch doesn’t care if the WWNs added are initiators or targets, its simply going to allow every WWN to talk to every other WWN in the zone. In our example 2 ACLs are created – one to allow the initiator to receive data from the target and another to allow the target to receive data from the initiator.  ThisRead More →

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If you are like pretty much everyone I know who lives in the Storage World you seldom know what port on your SAN Fabric a WWN is connected with.  With Cisco you end up using device manager or fabric manager to try and find it – it works but I’m a command line kind of guy… So I end up logging into each switch in my fabric and doing the ole “show flogi database” routine..   If you’ve got a switch or two it’s not that painful, but when you grow beyond that it’s just plain annoying. I’m tired of doing that.  I’m tired of logging in to countless switches until I come across the correct switch.  I finally got annoyed enough to do something about it.  I decided to write a simple Perl script to automate the whole process. Check out the results below:   [box] cincystorage@symcliserver pub $ ./flogi_search.pl 51 192.168.1.50,fc3/21,50:00:09:72:08:3b:81:51 192.168.1.50,fc4/25,20:11:00:11:0a:00:4a:51 192.168.1.50,fc4/26,20:12:00:11:0a:00:4a:51 192.168.1.50,fc4/19,10:00:00:00:c9:88:7b:51 [/box]  Read More →

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