FC SAN Zoning Best Practices

i am sure if you google "single initiator zoning" you will get a lot of hits. EMC has published a good paper on FC topology and other best practices but i did not see much on zoning best practices ..still good document for reference.

https://elabnavigator.emc.com/vault/pdf/FC_SAN.pdf

Dear dynamox,

Thank you for the information! It's very helpful.

Do you have any links to official guidelines? I want to learn more about this theme.

dynamox wrote: The two internal brocade switches are not going to be uplink to any other FC switches ?

Yes, they are directly connected to VNX storage system.

you want to connect SPA ports and SPB ports to each fabric so that when you zone each HBA it would look something like this:

Fabric A

Zone1 - HBA1 - SPA0

Zone2 - HBA1 - SPB2

Fabric B

Zone1 - HBA2 - SPB0

Zone2 - HBA2 - SPA2

best practice is still to use single target single initiator zoning. In the example above i zoned one host to 4 front-end ports on VNX but you can obviously zone to a few more if required. Try not to mix different vendor arrays in the same zone, try not to add SPs in the same zone, ie:

Zone1 - HBA1 - SPA0 and SPB2

if SanCopy software is installed on VNX, SPA0 will login to SPB2 and it will start generating warning messages in Unisphere.

The two internal brocade switches are not going to be uplink to any other FC switches ?

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glen