MDS9148 switch will not zone servers and NAS

[Julian.Milano]

I have two MDS9148 switches for redundancy and have a number of CISCO UCS Blade servers zoned to various EMC VNX SANs and it has all been working OK and still is.

We recently installed 3x Dell730 servers and a NetApp NAS and created the zoning on both switches for the combination of devices. On SW251 (one of the switches), the zoning has worked well and the Dells can see the NAS. But on SW250, I can see the WWNs of the Dell servers and the WWNs of the NAS however the zoning will not "join" the Dells to the NAS. I tried deleting the new zoning and recreating it, removed all the new zoning and added one at a time, but nothing is working on SW250.

I checked the port setups on both switches for the Dells and NAS and they are identical. It's like there's a setting on SW250 which will not allow any new zoning to "connect" the devices.

Can anyone think of anything I can check?

I'm using Cisco Device Manager to manage the devices and Cisco Fabric Manager to do the zoning.

[dynamoxxx]

new zones have been added to active zoneset and activated ?

[Julian.Milano]

Yes they have. Looking at Fabric Manager:

Datacentre\SAN\Fabric_MyFabricName\VSAN0010\Zones\

A tabbed view opens up on the right-hand-side of the screen and the first tab is "Active Zones", this shows the new zones and their entities.

[dynamoxxx]

if you run "sh running-config | grep dellserver_wwn" , do you see it ?

[Julian.Milano]

Got this output:

G0MDBR01E10250# sh running-config | grep 21:00:00:24:ff:75:90:fa
  vsan 10 wwn 21:00:00:24:ff:75:90:fa fcid 0x1d2900 dynamic
    member pwwn 21:00:00:24:ff:75:90:fa
    member pwwn 21:00:00:24:ff:75:90:fa
    member pwwn 21:00:00:24:ff:75:90:fa
    member pwwn 21:00:00:24:ff:75:90:fa
G0MDBR01E10250#

[Walter Dey]

What do you mean by NAS ? is this a FC device or IP ?

please post the output of the following CLI commands for both switches

- show zoneset vsan xxx

- show zoneset active vsan xxx 

- show vsan xxxx

[Julian.Milano]

Attached are the outputs of your commands on my switch SW250 which is not zoning the new devices correctly.

I've edited out the other zones as they would not be worth listing in this case.

[dynamoxxx]

zoning looks normal to me. I don't know how you do masking on Netapp but i assume the server WWN will login and then you do your LUN/device/volume mapping ?  And your issue is that you are not seeing the server WWN login to the array ?

[Julian.Milano]

The NAS/SAN which is a NetApp device connected via fibre and it can see the 3x Dell R730 servers' WWNs via the Switch251 which has the same zoning setup. The NetApp cannot see the WWNs of the Dell servers coming from Switch250.

I work on EMC SANs, but from what I can see on the NetApp, it will list the disconnected WWNs it sees and ask you if you want to apply them to a device. This is where I can see the WWNs of the servers coming from Switch 251 but the WWNs coming from Switch250 are no where to be seen.

[Julian.Milano]

I don't know what just happened, but the WWNs are appearing now on the NetApp now!!

The only thing I can think of is that Walters commands have triggered something, I don't know what!

Thank you all so much for your help. If you can help me to find out why it's suddenly working, maybe we can check a log file or something, then pls do!

[Walter Dey]

Hi Julian

I'm very confused ! 

... my switch SW250 which is not zoning the new devices correctly..

can you please explain, what you mean ?

Does the zone not appear in the list ?

If this is the case, could it be that "enhanced zoning" for this vsan is configured.

And you miss the command 

switch(config)# zone commit vsan xyz

[Julian.Milano]

Everything looks good on the switch SW250, I just cannot see the results of the zoning on the NetApp. The R730 servers' WWNs are not present.

I tried the command "zone commit vsan 0010" and got the error "Command is disallowed in current zoning mode". I then tried to switch off Enhanced mode using the command "no zone mode enhanced vsan 0010" which went OK, but still got the same error.

It seems there is something which is enabling the NEW zone creations on this switch, just not allowing them to activate and actually work!?

I'm so confused as to why!