user manual

59183-01 A 7-1
Section 7
Zoning Configuration
This section describes the following tasks:
 Displaying Zoning Database Information
 Configuring the Zoning Database
 Modifying the Zoning Database
 Resetting the Zoning Database
 Managing Zone Sets
 Managing Zones
 Managing Aliases
Consider device access needs within the fabric. Access is controlled by the use of
zoning. Some zoning strategies include the following:
 Separate devices by operating system.
 Separate devices that have no need to communicate with other devices in
the fabric or have classified data.
 Separate devices into department, administrative, or other functional group.
 Reserve a path and its bandwidth from one port to another.
Zoning divides the fabric for purposes 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. A port/device can be a member of up to
eight zones whose combined membership does not exceed 64.
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. 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 current fabric zoning.