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Zoning

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4 views

Zoning

Uploaded by

Michael
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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ZONING

Zoning enables you to set up access control between storage devices or user groups. If you have administrator
privileges in your fabric, you can create zones to increase network security and to prevent data loss or
corruption. Zoning is enforced by examining the source-destination ID field.
Zoning Features
Zoning has the following features:
• A zone consists of multiple zone members.
• Members in a zone can access each other; members in different zones cannot access each other.
• If zoning is not activated, all devices are members of the default zone.
• If zoning is activated, any device that is not in an active zone (a zone that is part of an active zone set) is a
member of the default zone.
• Zones can vary in size.
• Devices can belong to more than one zone.
• A zone set consists of one or more zones.
• A zone set can be activated or deactivated as a single entity across all switches in the fabric.
• Only one zone set can be activated at any time.
• A zone can be a member of more than one zone set.
• A zone switch can have a maximum of 1000 zone sets (Cisco MDS Series switches) or 500 zone sets (Cisco
Nexus 5000 Series switches).
• Zoning can be administered from any switch in the fabric.
• When you activate a zone (from any switch), all switches in the fabric receive the active zone set. Additionally,
full zone sets are distributed to all switches in the fabric if this feature is enabled in the source switch.
• If a new switch is added to an existing fabric, zone sets are acquired by the new switch.
• Zone changes can be configured nondisruptively. New zones and zone sets can be activated without
interrupting traffic on unaffected ports or devices.
• Zone membership criteria are based mainly on WWNs or FCIDs. You can configure and use FC alias, also
called the zone alias, while configuring zone membership of initiators and targets for specific zones. The
following criteria can be used while defining zone members:
• Port World Wide Name (pWWN): Specifies the pWWN of an N port attached to the switch as a member of the
zone.
• Fabric pWWN: Specifies the WWN of the fabric port (the switch port‘s WWN). This membership is also
referred to as port-based zoning.
• FCID: Specifies the FCID of an N port attached to the switch as a member of the zone.
• Interface and switch WWN (sWWN): Specifies the interface of a switch identified by the sWWN. This
membership is also referred to as interface-based zoning.
• Interface and domain ID: Specifies the interface of a switch identified by the domain ID.
• Domain ID and port number: Specifies the domain ID of an MDS domain and additionally specifies a port
belonging to a non-Cisco switch.
• IPv4 address: Specifies the IPv4 address (and optionally the subnet mask) of an attached device.
• IPv6 address: The IPv6 address of an attached device in 128 bits in colon-separated hexadecimal format.
• Symbolic-nodename: Specifies the member symbolic node name. The maximum length is 240 characters.
• Default zone membership includes all ports or WWNs that do not have a specific membership association.
Access between default zone members is controlled by the default zone policy.
All members of a zone can communicate with each other. For a zone with N members, N *(N – 1) access
permissions need to be enabled. The best practice is to avoid configuring large numbers of targets or large
numbers of initiators in a single zone. This type of configuration wastes switch resources by provisioning and
managing many communicating pairs (initiator-to-initiator or target-to-target) that will never actually
communicate with each other. For this reason, a single initiator with a single target is the most efficient
approach to zoning.

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