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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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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