Brocade Web Tools Administrator's Guide v6.1.0 (53-1000606-02, June 2008)

Web Tools Administrator’s Guide 111
53-1000606-02
Chapter
9
Administering Zoning
This chapter briefly describes zoning and provides the procedures for managing zoning using
Brocade Web Tools.
In this chapter
This chapter contains the following information:
•Introducing zoning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
•Configuring zoning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
•Managing zoning with Web Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
•Creating and populating zone aliases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
•Creating and populating zones. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
•Managing zone configurations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
•Managing the zoning database . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
•Best practices for zoning. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Introducing zoning
The Zoning Administration window provides two zoning options on the left hand pane.
• Basic zones.
• Traffic isolation zones.
Basic Zones
Basic zoning enables you to partition a storage area network (SAN) into logical groups of devices
that can access each other. For example, you can partition a SAN into two zones, winzone and
unixzone, so that the Windows servers and storage do not interact with UNIX servers and storage.
Zones can be configured dynamically. They can vary in size, depending on the number of
fabric-connected devices, and devices can belong to more than one zone. Because zone members
can access only other members of the same zone, a device not included in a zone is not available
to members of that zone.
Traffic Isolation zones
A traffic isolation zone (TI zone) is a special zone that creates a dedicated path for a specific traffic
flow. TI zones are primarily for shaping and controlling traffic rather than partitioning access to
storage.