How to detect an inactive zone on MDS?

[Thiago Henriques]

Folks,

We do have two MDS's, and I am really curious to know if there is a possibility to force the MDS notify me when any zone becomes inactive? IMHO, if any server has an issue in any zone, does the MDS see that zone as inactive?

Thanks,

Thiago Henriques

[jihicks]

Hi Thiago,

Inactive zone? 

Zonesets are active or inactive. 

They do not go inactive by themself. 

You can have one zoneset active in a switch per VSAN.

You might have a zone that is not assigned to a zoneset, which you can see with

"show zone analysis vsan ".

Best regards,

Jim

[Thiago Henriques]

Jim,

Thanks for your input. However, I'm looking for some pro-active way to make the MDS notify if any zone becomes inactive. I'm not sure if the only way to know about an inactive zone is by 'show' commands.

Thanks,

Thiago

[jihicks]

Hi Thiago,

Please define what you mean by inactive zone and give me an example.

Sorry, but Inactive zone does not mean anything to me.

Best regards,

Jim

[Thiago Henriques]

Jim,

From my understanding, zone is simply a  'zone' by which allows server(s) to access storage frame(s), this is the case at work. Now, if some issue happens with the servers causing the zones to be inactive, (not zoneset), can the MDS notify which zones became inactive OR we have to go thru with the storage folks to hunt down the affected zones and re-zone them?

I hope this helps,

Thanks,

Thiago

[jihicks]

Hi Thiago,

There is no such thing as an inactive zone. 

Zones are defined by you, added to a zoneset and the zoneset activated.

Best regards,

Jim

[Thiago Henriques]

Jim,

The reason why I have this topic is because couple days ago we had a issue with some servers in which they needed to be re-zoned. With that in mind, I'm not sure if from MDS perspective nothing happened or it could have alerted some issue with some zones.

Thanks,

Thiago

[jihicks]

Hi Thiago,

Servers don't become unzoned by themselves.

Possibilities that come to mind:

(1)Depends on how you are zoning, for example:

If by port, the port changed

if by PWWN, the PWWN changed, HBA changed or server moved to another physical device.

Maybe the PWWN or port on the storage changed?

(2)Someone activated a new zoneset that did not have the old zone as a member, removing the zone from the active

zoneset. 

Neither of these happens without human intervention.

You need to determine what happened to know how to proceed.

Best regards,

Jim

[elfurbe]

I know I'm necromancing this thread, but I showed up looking for a similar tool and I think the replies got kind of hung up on your vocabulary. I believe what you're asking is for a way to detect when members within zones in an active zoneset go dark. I don't know a good programatic way to do that, but from the cli you can see it visually from the output of: show zoneset active

Here's a snippet that shows what I mean:

mds# sh zones a

zoneset name zoneset-A vsan 1

  zone name host0_hba0-target0_hba0 vsan 1

    pwwn

    pwwn

  zone name host1_hba1-target1_hba1 vsan 1

  * fcid 0x [pwwn ]

  * fcid 0x [pwwn ]

  zone name host2_hba2-target2_hba2 vsan 1

  * fcid 0x [pwwn ]

  pwwn

In that example output the first zone is entirely "inactive" in that the member PWWNs are not FLOGI'd to the fabric. The second zone that shows the "*" and the fcid are entirely "active" in that all the member PWWNs are FLOGI'd to the fabric. The third zone shows what you would see if only part of the zone is logged in which could happen if you lost a server but the target was still online or vice versa. If you're doing regular configuration pulls somewhere, you could likely do some moderately convoluted text parsing (which is what I'm thinking I need to do, sigh) to find zones with members that are signed out of the fabric as that typically indicates something has happened to interrupt fabric communication with that member device. This could mean the device is offline for some reason not directly related to the fabric or some other configuration situation like port vsan membership changed, as an example. In my instance, I have a lot of cruft zones that were not removed in a timely fashion from the active zoneset and/or the config in general so I'm going to use the data to stage cleanup efforts.

I think that's more along the lines of an "answer" to your question. Syntactically speaking, all the previous replies are accurate, there is no literal "active" state for a zone itself, that syntax only applies to zonesets. Functionally speaking in common terminology, I would agree that a zone in an active zoneset with no logged in members constitutes an "inactive" zone.

Hope that's helpful a year later, or at least helpful to someone!