Fabric OS Administrator's Guide v7.0.0 (53-1002148-02, June 2011)

248 Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide
53-1002148-02
Zone aliases
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Broadcast zones and FC-FC routing
If you create broadcast zones in a metaSAN consisting of multiple fabrics connected through an FC
router, the broadcast zone must include the IP device that exists in the edge or backbone fabric as
well as the proxy device in the remote fabric. See Chapter 23, “Using the FC-FC Routing Service,”
for information about proxy devices and the FC router.
High availability considerations with broadcast zones
If a switch has broadcast zone-capable firmware on the active CP (Fabric OS v5.3.x or later) and
broadcast zone-incapable firmware on the standby CP (Fabric OS version earlier than v5.3.0), then
you cannot create a broadcast zone because the zoning behavior would not be the same across an
HA failover. If the switch failed over, then the broadcast zone would lose its special significance and
would be treated as a regular zone.
Loop devices and broadcast zones
Delivery of broadcast packets to individual devices in a loop is not controlled by the switch.
Consequently, adding loop devices to a broadcast zone does not have any effect. If a loop device is
part of a broadcast zone, then all devices in that loop receive broadcast packets.
Best practice: All devices in a single loop should have uniform broadcast capability. If all the
devices in the loop can handle broadcast frames, then add the FL_Port to the broadcast zone.
Broadcast zones and default zoning mode
The default zoning mode defines the device accessibility behavior if zoning is not implemented or if
there is no effective zone configuration. The default zoning mode has two options:
• All Access—All devices within the fabric can communicate with all other devices.
• No Access—Devices in the fabric cannot access any other device in the fabric.
If a broadcast zone is active, even if it is the only zone in the effective configuration, the default
zone setting is not in effect.
If the effective configuration has only a broadcast zone, then the configuration appears as a No
Access configuration. To change this configuration to All Access, you must put all the available
devices in a regular zone.
See “Default zoning mode” on page 255 for additional information about default zoning.
Zone aliases
A zone alias is a logical group of ports or WWNs. You can simplify the process of creating zones by
first specifying aliases, which eliminates the need for long lists of individual zone member names.
If you are creating a new alias using aliCreate w, “1,1”, and a user in another Telnet session
executes cfgEnable (or cfgDisable, or cfgSave), the other user’s transaction will abort your
transaction and you will receive an error message. Creating a new alias while there is a zone merge
taking place might also abort your transaction. For more details about zone merging and zone
merge conflicts, see “Zone merging” on page 265.