Difference between Vsan and Zoning

[Khurram Shahzad]

Hi Can any one tell whats the difference between VSAN and zoning.

[Patrick Terlisten · Accepted solution]

Hi,

a VSAN is a virtual fabric with it's own set of fabric services etc. You can implement a VSAN for security or redundancy purposes.

Zoning is a grouping of devices which helps you to restrict access to storage devices or servers. Only devices which belongs to the same zone can "see" each other. Zoning can be done by grouping ports, WWPN or WWNN together.

You can combine VSAN and zoning without problems.

Best regards,
Patrick

[Khurram Shahzad]

Hi Thanks for your reply. Can you explain VSAN a bit more. I have understood the concept of Zoning.

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hi,

take your fabric and lay a virtual layout over it. You partition you fabric into two or more fabrics. Each virtual fabric has it's own set of fabric serves, for example fabric nameservice, RSCN etc. If you have serval customers in you SAN and you want to prevent a host of customer A to read informations from the nameserver about the storage of customer B, a VSAN can be a solution. This is because customer A has it's own "SAN" with his own fabric services. The other virtual fabric don't know anything about the other fabric. So you need a router (inter vsan-routing) to communicate between two fabrics. Another benefit of VSANs is availability. If you have a switch and you build two VSANs, you can connect each server with one path to each virtual fabric. A dual-fabric with one switch. ;) You should do this only with director-class switches because of the hardware availability. ;)

VSAN was developed by Cisco. So this term is only valid for cisco. Brocade call it LSAN. Brocade has also a Meta-SAN. A Meta-SAN are two or more fabrics connected by a Brocade FC-Router.

Hope this helps.

Best regards,
Patrick

[Sivakumar MJ._1]

When you create a VSAN an NEW & SEPERATE set of configuration is created within the new VSAN. The new configuration is a replica of services which consists of fabric services like name server, zone server, domain controller, login server, alias server.