Zoning question on Fibre Channel Switch

[ROSS HANSON]

We have an AE370A, 4GB San Switch, on our c7000 blade enclosure.
We have the switch going to a MSA2012fc storage unit with two enclosures,the main and a second one.
Our blade servers have many virtual machines on the main MSA enclosure and we want to add a Compaq Proliant box to the mix. Connecting it to the same fibre channel switch BUT only giving it access to the second MSA enclosure.

After doing the configuration for zoning in WebTools the last question is "Do you want to activate this configuration?"
If I say Yes to this question will I lose my blade servers from connecting to the virtual machines on the primary MSA enclosure? We do not have zoning set up on our blade servers at all. Or do I have to create a zone for our blade servers in addition to the zone I created for the proliant box?

[Pieter 't Hart · Accepted solution]

Yes when using zones you must define all paths that need to communicate.

The statement "will I lose my blade servers from connecting to the virtual machines" must be described as: your blades will lose contact with the storage presented by the msa (the storage where the vdisks and configfiles are stored).

Also you do not setup zoning on the bladeservers, but on the SAN-switch that connects the blades to the storage.

If you create only a zone for the proliant and no zone for the blades, the blades will lose contact to the msa.

There are several white papers about zoning on a SAN.
Up-to creating a zone for every two HBA's that need to connect to each other.
Then group zones into a config.

[ROSS HANSON]

Thank you Peter
Just to let you know though, I have every intention of doing the zoning on the switch.
I aplologize that I was not clear on that point