smart zoning on cisco

do you have to go through some kind of conversion process or SmartZones can work next to traditional zones in the same zone set?

Yeah,  they have a conversion process which will identify each member as either an initiator or target by probing the name server for the information.

When you add a member it's just like the current syntax except you have to specify it as either init, target, or both:

member pwwn 10:00:00:12:134:56:99 target

Zoning then will only allow initiators to talk to targets and not other initiators.

Enabling Smart Zoning is as simple as  "zone smart-zoning enable vsan 100".   Then you have to convert your existing zones... you can do it per zone, vsan, zonetset, or fc alias like so: "zone convert smart-zoning zone name vsan " or "zone convert smart-zoning vsan "

If, for whatever reason, you need an target to talk to a target or init to init you just disable Smart Zoning on that zone: "no attribute disable-smart-zoning" inside that zone..

It's a simple process really.. I don't know about you but adding a new host to my esx farm requires so many zones... it's a big pain in the ass for most people (not me, since i automate it with perl )

my ESX farms are not as big as yours, especially now that we are migrating from HP C-class blades to big UCS blades. I use bash for creating zone files that i import in Fabric Manager, i save perl for big parsing jobs

I have about 160 blades all in in my ESX farms.. so many zones....Can you import a zone into Fabric Managler?  I usually have just created them via cli, then activate via FM.

I have lots of issues with FM tho... runs slow...randomly stop working... thats why it's Fabric Managler lol

yes, you can import new zones in Fabric Manager, once you go into "edit active zone set" option, select Restore and point to a file name that contains your new zones (file should start with first line "config terminal").

Mark, i am telling you man ..YOU WILL automate yourself out of a job

Damn,  learned something new today. I have defined templates for my zones (by port group on the VMAXs, or SP pairs on the VNXs).. so all I do is "./newzone.pl [-existinghost | -newhost | -wwn] ".

If you specify -newhost it generated the config to create the fcalias and uses that to zone,  -existinghost will presume the existance of an fcalias, and -wwn will forgo all aliasing and uses straight member pwwn...

It's was pretty nice..but Smart Zoning is a lot nicer in my environment..

yep, followed by software defined storage administrator

Haha We're pretty lean on staffing here...  we've got 4 vmax, 4 vnx, and 4 cx arrays.. plus 3 isilons, a few centera 16 node clusters, 4 datadomains, and a dozen celerra data movers.  It's just me and a junior admin i'm training... I guess that's about 7pb of managed space per admin... not sure what the normal is..but seems pretty low to me...

I figure if I don't automate myself out of a job VMAX Cloud Edition or VPLEX Cloud Edition (I think thats the next logical step) will do it anyways

Talking about automation and zoning, have you guys seen the new proposal for target driven zoning ? Erik Smith ( @ErikSmith7 ) presented it last year at EMCworld, and he told me they will be demoing it this year. This is long post, but is is a very interesting one :

Introducing Target Driven Zoning (TDZ) - Brass Tacks

In a nutshell :

Without TDZ

1. Physically attach hosts and storage to the fabric.
2. Using the switch zoning interface, create a zone that contains an initiator and its targets.  Repeat for every initiator/target relationship being added to the environment.
3. Activate the new Zone Set / Configuration.
4. Using the Storage array management interface, add each initiator to a “Storage Group” on the array.

With TDZ

1. Physically attach hosts and storage to the fabric.
2. Using the Storage array management interface, add each initiator to a “Storage Group” on the array.  The storage will then automatically setup the appropriate zones to allow each initiator to access it.

We're around 90% VM here today.. with a rather anti-public-cloud legal policy... so i'm curious how the vmware vCloud quite plays out in effecting my role as a storage administrator..

now that would be slick, interesting how this would handle the different routing mechanism (IVR)

I actually have a perl script somewhere that I have used to make my initial zoning during switch migrations from McBroData to Cisco.. It just dumps the masking db, parses it, and outputs zones...  Intresting idea to automate the creation of that zone... I think what you'd have behind the scenes is a default zone which contains every initiator which isnt already in a zone and all the targets...Then you just probe the masking database for any new entries, and generate the zone.. it sounds pretty friggin sweet...

Sounds like a reason to have a few drinks @ EMC World and discuss..

Mark,

can you share how you approached this "conversion" process? Were you using traditional zoning before that and how did you convert to smart zones ? Did you create new smart zones, put them in the active zone set and removed the other ones ? At one site i am getting ready to migrate from 9222i/9134 hodge-podge to 9509 so there i am thinking of starting with Smart Zones from the get go but at my other side i have 9513 where i would like to implement it "in-place".