HP Mainframe Connectivity Design Guide

• In an intermix environment, do not mix FCP and FICON ports in the same zone. Use Fibre
Channel zoning guidelines for the FCP ports, as described in the HP SAN Design Reference
Guide. For more information about intermix, see “FICON SAN best practices” (page 154).
• In an intermix environment, do not include non-FICON blades (such as the FC4-48 blade and
the iSCSI blade) in the FICON zone.
• For 4 Gb/s and 2 Gb/s FICON directors, avoid transitions to soft zoning in a
hardware-enforced zoning environment.
• Use the portzoneshow command to display and verify the zoning status of each port.
◦ Hard—Hardware enforcement
◦ Soft—Name Server and ASIC-assisted authentication
◦ All—No zoning enforcement
NOTE: As a best practice, HP recommends that you use Port Zoning (domain number, port
number) for FICON zones.
Changed zoning message
The following messages indicate that a port has changed to soft zoning:
WARNING ZONE-ZONEGROUPADDFAIL, 3, WARNING - port 7 Out of CAM entries
WARNING ZONE-SOFTZONING, 3, WARNING - port 7: zoning enforcement changed
to SOFT
The zoning configuration has exceeded the limits, forcing the specified port to change from
hardware-enforced zoning to software-enforced zoning. Other zone members remain hardware
enforced. These warning messages appear at zoning configuration time (for port-level zoning) or
dynamically at run time (for WWN zoning).
Primary management director recommendations (B-series FICON directors)
Recommendations for primary management directors follow:
• Designate one director in the fabric as the primary management director and use it for all
management and control, including zoning, Time Services, Fabric Manager, and Web Tools.
Using one director for access prevents multiple administrators from making changes to directors
in the fabric at the same time.
• Configure the primary management director in the fabric as the preferred principal director
by using the fabricprincipal command.
• The principal director assignment can vary in a fabric. The assignment depends on the state
of the fabric, the director WWN, and whether other directors or fabrics merge with that fabric.
The principal director in a fabric may not remain a principal director once new directors are
added to the fabric or the fabric is reconfigured. The Fibre Channel standards specify the
mechanisms for implementing the fabricprincipal command. These mechanisms allow
a preference for a director that requests to be the principal director in a fabric; however, they
do not guarantee that this request will be granted.
NOTE: The fabricprincipal command is available with Fabric OS 4.1.0 or later.
• Fabric Manager uses the primary management director as the main access point to the fabric.
• Fabric time synchronization is available with Fabric OS 2.6.1, 3.1, and 4.1 (or later). Directors
in a fabric where security is not enabled synchronize time with the principal director in the
fabric. The principal director in the fabric synchronizes its clock with an NTP time server by
identifying the time server with the tsclockserver command. In a fabric where security is
Fabric rules 43