fcalias or device-alias ?

[planzone]

Greetings,

Iam a newbie to the san switch world. We have a MDS 9500 san switch and I am configuring and have questions about aliases.  I see our older Cisco san switch uses device-alias, but the new one uses fcalias. Both commands seem to work on the new 9500 (again pardon my ignorance) but which would you folks recommend to use and why?

My background are 4500 core switches for ethernet. I kind of understand the "vsan" terminology.

thanks for reading

[Roman Rodichev]

Absolutely use device aliases for a simple reason that they are automatically distributed between switches with CFS. Fcaliases are old.

[hershal06]

I agree with Roman. Another benefit of device aliases's is their information is put into output of other commands. For instance a show flogi database will list the device aliases next to the WWN if it is found in the database.

[dynamoxxx]

we've been using fcaliases, full zoneset is distributed so they are available on all switches in the fabric. It would be easier for me do my IVR zoninng in FM if we were using device aliases but we don't do it often so it's ok.

[Vu Phan]

Fcalias con only use with zone/zoneset.  Device alias can be use with any service using CFS

Thanks