Cisco SMART Zoning - Yes it is Smart enough !

Smart Zoning is pretty awesome and I highly recommend it to anyone. The basic idea is that you will create a smart zone as various types. In my example i'm going with a 15 host ESX environment called ESXProd connect to two fabrics, A and B on separate HBA ports. Each fabric has two VMAX FA ports shared by the ESX hosts.  Using traditional 1-to-1 zoning each host would have something like this:

ESX1_HBA1_7e1 VSAN 1
ESX1_HBA1_9e1 VSAN 1
ESX1_HBA2_8e1 VSAN 2
ESX1_HBA2_10e1 VSAN 2

Each zone contains two member pwwn - one for the server's HBA and one for the FA Port. All in i'd have 60 zones (4 zones times 15 hosts) to manage and deal with.

Using a one-to-many SmartZone we allow a single initiator to connect to multiple targets.  That means my zoning per server is now:

ESX1_HBA1_7e1_9e1 VSAN 1
ESX1_HBA2_8e1_10e1 VSAN 2

Each zone has three pwwn - one for the server's HBA, and two for the FA Ports. It's a lot less zones than the traditional approach,  but it's still 30 zones in all. I think the better option is the many-to-one SmartCone which allows multiple initiators to talk to a single target. sing this we end up with far less zones, like this:

ESXProd_7e1 VSAN 1
ESXProd_9e1 VSAN 1
ESXProd_8e1 VSAN 2
ESXProd_10e1 VSAN 2

Each SmartConnect zone contains 16 pwwn.  15 for server HBA WWNs and 1 for the FA WWN.  Total zones used?  Four.  When adding a new ESX host to this cluster we simple modify the SmartZone to add a new member pwwn.

The third option,  which Cisco does not recommend but does work is many-to-many.  We'd end up with two zones, one per fabric.

You can zone using device alias, pwwn, fcid, or fc alias as members in SmartZones. Enable SmartZone at the fabric, zone, or zoneset level..

When you add a member it's just like the current syntax except you have to specify it as either init, target, or both:

member pwwn 10:00:00:12:134:56:99 target

Zoning then will only allow initiators to talk to targets and not other initiators.

Enabling Smart Zoning is as simple as  "zone smart-zoning enable vsan 100".   Then you have to convert your existing zones... you can do it per zone, vsan, zonetset, or fc alias like so: "zone convert smart-zoning zone name <name> vsan <n>" or "zone convert smart-zoning vsan <n>"


If, for whatever reason, you need an target to talk to a target or init to init you just disable Smart Zoning on that zone: "no attribute disable-smart-zoning" inside that zone..