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Bill Weiss
Asked: 2011-01-25 05:51:59 +0800 CST

Fibre Channel zoning best practices

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I'm hoping that this will be useful for more people than just me.

Right now I've got a fibre channel switch, a NetApp filer, and some servers running Oracle. All of the servers can see the same LUNs on the filer, and there's some internal clustering magic to keep them from stomping over each other's disk. The switch is zoned such that each server is in its own zone with the disks it can see. Thus, something like this:

Zone1 = {Oracle1, NetApp1, NetApp2}
Zone2 = {Oracle2, NetApp1, NetApp2}
Zone3 = {Oracle3, NetApp1, NetApp2}

(Those are soft zones based on WWN). My question is, is this the best way to do things, or would be be better to have one zone for all the things that share resources?

Zone1 = {Oracle1, Oracle2, Oracle3, NetApp1, NetApp2}

It seems to me like those are the same thing, but maybe there's something I don't know about? It looks like a little less management overhead to do it this way. Not a lot, but a little.

fibre-channel best-practices zoning

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Best-practice is to keep things as you have them instead of one-big-zone. It makes it easier to pull things out. Also, depending on your hardware support (I don't know NetApp so I don't know if this applies to them) you might want to split your zones further:

    Zone1A - {Oracle1, NetApp1}
    Zone1B - {Oracle1, NetApp2}

    The idea being that your storage devices shouldn't see each-other unless they have to again, that may not be a concern for NetApp. You're doing quite well as you are.

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