simple zoning example MDS + UCS

[nflnetwork]

hi there we are migrating from brocade to MDS and I think it makes sense to clean up the alias / zoning configurations during this time. 

I have 3 storage arrays , 10 UCS Blade servers and 5 non-Cisco rack Servers

All devices have HBA1 and HBA 2 (the arrays may have more)

HBA 1 is fabric A vsan 200

HBA 2 is fabric B vsan 201

I have created the port-channel between the MDS 9148T and the UCS Fabric interconnect. 6248 (1 per fabric) 

How should i zone it?

IS it simple just to create one zone set for each array and ADD all my servers (blade + rack) into that zone?

Does that make sense?

All servers can access the arrays; there is no real reason to create 1 zone for each server i dont think, 

Any suggestions or feedback?

Thanks. 

[Bhavin Yadav]

Hi nflnetwork,

The best would be to create 1:1 zoning. But you can also use smart zoning or use auto zone feature.

Autozone is useful in single switch fabric. Smartzoning optimizes your switch resources (by removing server to server and storage to storage zone entries) plus it help simplify  addition / removal of any WWNs in the zone entries. 

More details here: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/mds9000/sw/8_x/config/fabric/cisco_mds9000_fabric_config_guide_8x/configuring_and_managing_zones.html 

[nflnetwork]

thanks for the reply Bhavin,

Is smart zoning and auto zone feature the same thing? or do they have some differences?

 please forgive me i am not familiar with these terms. 

Also for AutoZone feature can it be configure in advance or do the all the device need to be physically connected to MDS switch for it to detect.

[Tom MacDonald]

I would definitely move to smart zoning as it saves a few steps when zoning 1 initiator to 1 target. Are you only using 1 vsan? Another way to organize this is one vsan per array? So if you have 3 disk arrays, you would have 3 vsan's per fabric. This also means you need some additional vnics on the UCS side, but you can also tweak the storage traffic if necessary and makes the organization a bit easier.

One last note, don't forget to spread the load (fc connections/cabling) across the MDS forwarding engines. The 9248T has 3, fc1/1-16, fc1/17-32 and fc1/33-48.