Zoning of blade servers

[avamar11]

Hi All ,

Can anyone share some thoughts regarding some best practices for fabric zoning of blade server ....

[Uwe Zessin]

It is not different from zoning for single-box servers:
I prefer a WWN-based single-initiator zoning. It even allows you to move the blade to a different slow, e.g. for troubleshooting.

Depending on the storage array it is possible to put multiple ports of that array into the same zone, but it seems that the 'best practices' even go to a single-initiator/single-target zoning.

[avamar11]

Yes ...but in blade fabric switch should be NPIV enabled ,can you tell more about it ?

[Uwe Zessin]

It works fine without NPIV. NPIV is used when you install Virtual Connect modules instead of plain Fibre Channel switches or , for example, run Brocade switches in "Access Gateway" mode or use NPIV together with VMware ESX, Hyper-V, some special Windows environments.

I dare to say that in many environments you don't need to bother with NPIV.