Brocade Zoning

[hpuxsa]

Hi,
We have two 2800 brocades connected to EMC8730. We have connected HPUX servers and a win2K server to the brocade.We do not have zoning enabled now.
We are planning to replace the 2800's with 3900's. The EMC engineers are suggesting to enable zoning on the brocade. But the issue is they are insisting on creating a zone for each hba and FA.
EMC's suggestion
Zone A -> hba0-1stFA(Adapter on the EMC).
Zone B -> hba0-2ndFA
Zone C -> hba0-3rdFA
Zone D -> hba0-4th FA
If we do this way we will end up having 8 zones per server because we have two hba's per server. So we suggested to create only two zones one for the win2k server and the other one for the hpux servers but EMC does not agree to that. Please advise which would be the best.

[Stefan Farrelly]

This is interesting because its not the way EMC setup our brocades and zones. We have 1 zone per hba. eg. we usually run 2 fibre cards on each HPUX server so 2 zones per server. This is what they recommended, setup, and we have been following as we add more servers.

So in your case 1 zone for all HP servers and 1 for all Win2k servers is too small, you should have at least 1 for each hba on each server (HP or Win2K).

[Sunil Sharma_1]

Hi,

Both way is Ok but if you do the zoining in your way it will affact LUN Masking/security. it means LUN assign to one server will be visiable to another server also and it can be dangerous.

so my advise is go with EMC recommendation like 2 zone per server. one for each HBA.

Sunil

[Zeev Schultz]

By the way,I'm not sure that hp hbas will support fabric with emc8730.As far as I know it supports symmetrix 3,4,5,4.8 and 5.5.It works with fabric in your setup?

Zeev

[Mark Greene_1]

We have a CX600, which may play differently than the Symetrics do with the Brocade, but we setup 1 zone per server because we use PowerPath to have both failover and load balancing accross both HBAs (for systems that have 2 HBAs).

HTH
mark

[hpuxsa]

Hi Sunil,

We use Volume Logix software from EMC which takes care of LUN security.

Hi Zeev,

We use HP Taychon (A5158) adapters and it works in Fabric mode.

Is zoning a must when we have volume logix software? What the EMC engineer says is without zoning the switch would work like a normal hub. Is that true? I thought the SAN switch would work like a network switch and zoning is something similar to creating a vlan. If that is the case then the data coming into the brocade will not be sent to all ports and it would only be sent to the designated port looking at the wwn entry from dynamic table created by the switch. Please correct me if i am wrong.

[Vincent Fleming · Accepted solution]

You are correct about how the switches work.

We normally create 1 zone per hba, so a typical server would have 2 zones (one for each fabric when using redundant fabrics).

There's no harm creating the zones the way EMC suggests, but it's overkill in my opinion.

It's a good idea to zone even when you're using Volume Logix because the zoning will provide some additional fault isolation... possibly preventing one system's errors from effecting other systems. For example, if a system's HBA goes nuts and spews garbage on the SAN and it's not zoned, it may cause other systems on the SAN to report errors and/or fail. Zoning it out would prevent any other systems' from seeing any of the errant traffic.

Good luck,

Vince

[Bill Rothanburg]

Hello,

One thing you didn't mention is if the switches are connected together through the fiber ports. If the switches are not connected together, then the zoning will be independent between the switches. This will result in two zones for each server, one on each switch.

If the switches are interconnected, then the zoning information will be replicated between all of the interconnected switches.

We have implemented several Sans where there is an "A" and a "B" side to the SAN, each independent of the other. The servers and disk arrays are connected to both sides of the SAN.


Also, we have had incidents of different servers (OS) interfering with each other in the past. The zoning has corrected these problems.


Finally, I recently read some white papers put out by Brocade on Zoning that I found useful. Check out http://www.brocade.com/san/white_papers.jsp.

Regards,

Bil

[generic_1]

I assume you have a A fabric and a B fabric
Therefore there should be one zone for each HBA. Then present whatever devices you want. Ive seen too many issues with multiple zones on a server HBA in the past. Single port initiator is the industry standard. I would stick with one zone per server HBA. Put good aliases on your ports so you know what the heck they are. If you have the luxary of say 4 hbas on your server you could load balance, manually or allow your pathing software to take advatage of the extra paths :). Use port zoning, its makes it harder for people to mess up your port planning and trunks. Also, if you blow a HBA all you have to do is update your disk mask and not the zone config.