Cisco MDS 9000 Family Release Notes for Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 5.2(8a) (OL-27554-05, May 16, 2013)

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Cisco MDS 9000 Family Release Notes for Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 5.2(8a)
OL-27554-05
New Features in Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 5.2
New Features in Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 5.2(8)
Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 5.2(8) is a maintenance release that includes bug fixes. It does not include
new features.
New Features in Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 5.2(6b)
Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 5.2(6b) is a maintenance release that includes bug fixes. It does not include
new features.
New Features in Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 5.2(6a)
Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 5.2(6a) is a maintenance release that includes bug fixes and a scalability
improvement for the following feature:
• Cisco I/O Accelerator
Starting with Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 5.2(6a), the number of supported I/O Accelerator (IOA)
flows has increased to 1000.
New Features in Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 5.2(6)
Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 5.2(6) includes the new features described in the following sections:
• Smart Zoning, page 25
• Storage Media Encryption Features, page 26
Smart Zoning
Cisco smart zoning simplifies zoning to reduce the burden on administrators and enable automation of
SAN provisioning without affecting SAN hardware resource consumption. When the smart zoning
feature is enabled, Cisco MDS 9000 Family fabrics provision the hardware access control entries
specified by the zone set more efficiently. Administrators can define zones as one-to-many, or
many-to-many without incurring a penalty in switch resource consumption. As a result, zones can be
defined to correspond to entities that are meaningful in their data center operations. For example, they
can define a zone for an application, or for an application cluster, or for a hypervisor cluster without
compromising internal resource utilization.
Follow these guidelines for smart zoning:
• Smart zoning requires that all Cisco MDS 9000 Family switches in the fabric use Cisco MDS 9000
NX-OS Software Release 5.2(6) or later and have the smart zoning feature enabled.
• Smart zoning cannot be enabled if the fabric contains third-party switches or switches running
earlier versions of Cisco MDS 9000 NX-OS or SAN-OS software.
• Once you enable smart zoning, you cannot add a switch to the fabric that does not support smart
zoning.
• Before downgrading from a switch that has smart zoning enabled, disable smart zoning on all
VSANs; otherwise, the downgrade is disruptive.