Zoning Brocade switches

This tutorial provides a quick walk-through of setting up zoning on a Brocade switch. It is not a comprehensive review of the topic, but it may give you some familiarity with the commands and syntax necessary to set up zoning in the Tatasky environment.

What is zoning?

Zoning provides a way to logically group together the components of a SAN. Ports,
interfaces and even switches themselves can be grouped together into configurations that work together to make SANs more orderly and less daunting.


Managing configurations

All zoning in the Brocade environment is done within configurations. A configuration contains aliases and zones.

An alias is a tool to simplify repetitive port numbers or WWN entries into an easy-to-remember name. For instance: rather than typing in the WWN
"50:00:0e:10:00:00:00:17" in zoning operations, one could use an alias to identify the WWN as being "PBAKB035_S1P2". Aliases can also be used to identify multiple ports or WWNs by a single name. All zoning commands accept aliases as valid parameters.

A zone is a set of devices that access one another. All devices connected to a Fabric may be configured into one or more zones. Devices that are in the same zone can see each other, devices that are in different zones can not.


Commands used in this example

alicreate : Creates new zone aliases. Assigns a name to a list of alias members. Alias members can include port numbers (for example; 1,2 indicates switch 1, port 2) or WorldWide? names. If there are multiple alias members, all members must be separated by semicolons within the list of alias members.



example : alicreate "PBAKB035_S1P2", "50:00:0e:10:00:00:00:17"


zonecreate : Groups a list of zone members under a zone name. Zone members can include port numbers, WorldWide? names, or aliases created by the alicreate command. Multiple zone members must be separated by semicolons within the list of zone members.



example : zonecreate "c2zone", "snowtop_c2; df350_intfc_1"

cfgcreate : Assigns a configuration name to a list of configuration members. The configuration members are all zones Multiple configuration members are separated by semicolons.

example : cfgcreate "c2config", "c2zone"

cfgenable : Checks a specified configuration for errors and makes it the active configuration of the switch. Note: No zoning is applied to the switch until the cfgenable command completes successfully. If there is already an active configuration, cfgenable will replace the active configuration with the specified configuration.

example : cfgenable "c2config"

cfgdisable : Deactivates a specified configuration

example : cfgdisable "c2config"

cfgsave : Saves zoning information to switch's flash memory. Configuration will not survive a reboot of the switch until the configuration is saved.

cfgclear : Deactivates and removes all zoning information from active memory. To remove a configuration from flash memory, run cfgsave after cfgclear.

zoneshow : Shows zoning configuration.

switchshow : Shows overall configuration of switch. WWNs, login types (F-port, L-Port etc.) port status and some general switch info show up in switchshow.


Setting up a zoning configuration

The following example sets up a switch so that the LUNs presented on controller 0 of a DF350 Fibre unit are presented either to controller 2 or controller 3 of a Sun Solaris host depending on which configuration is activated.

Please note : If ANY ports on a switch are in an active zone configuration, ALL ports on the switch MUST be zoned in order to be useable. Since this example only uses ports 4-7 of the switch, ports 0-3 would not be useable until they were included in the active zoning configuration.

Another note : Usually it is best to zone by WWN, rather than by port number. That way, if a port goes bad the user just has to move the affected interface cable to a different port on the switch and the zoning should still be in place.