Virtual Connect Fibre Channel - Zoning

[chuckk281]

Reginald had a customer question:

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        Question regarding our 8Gb Virtual Connect Fibre Interconnect modules. Is it possible to zone the ports of the 8Gb module to the SAN fabric even if there are no blades in the enclosure? Customer is trying to zone the ports of our VC-FC modules to their Cisco MDS9513 fabric but our ports are showing up on the fabric as server ports which won't allow them to be zoned. Is there something we're missing in getting these ports zoned on the fabric and having them show up as none server ports?

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From Scott:

Has the customer considered virtualizing the WWNs, assigning VC profiles to the empty bays, and then zoning the known WWNs that result from the profile assignment?  They don't need to have the servers to know what these WWNs will be.

From Reginald:

      The customer has gone through the overall VC Domain definition with the selection of using the VC assign MAC and WWN's. I don't think that they have assigned any profiles to the bays as of yet. But even if they went through domain creation, there is nothing to propagate the WWN's down to the fabric. Correct?

From Mark:

Correct, perhaps manually adding WWN to zones?

From Reginald:

      Question, should the WWN's of the VC-FC modules present themselves as server or storage WWN's

From Dan:

Not sure if you're asking about Port Type F/E/N or WWN type 50: 10: etc.

NPIV which all our VC FC (and VC FF FC ports) dictates how the F/N ports are handled.

Standard N Port ID Virtualization.

50: vs 10: all depends on the HBA and the Virtual WWN setting in VC.

If you use Factory WWNs, they will most likely be 10: or 20: series addresses as expected because the WWN actually comes from our partners who make HBAs like Emulex and QLogic.  When you turn on Virtual WWNs in Virtual Connect, the virtual pools come from the 50: block because HP is a storage vendor and we effectively burned a large block of those ports to become the Virtual WWN pools in VC and VCEM.  Might be confusing to some storage admins but as far as I am aware, doesn't violate any FC rules.

Hope that helps.

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Any other input to this conversation?