What is the best way to do zoning? Let's say we have 10-20 servers with four HBAs and one HDS9960. Should we zone each HBA and storage port in the same zone? (This means each server will have four zones, each zone has two members with one being the HBA and the other one a storage port.) Or, do we zone in a few large zones and use LUN security at storage side to specify LUN ownership?

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If you keep your zones small, there is less possibility of interaction between servers that are experiencing problems. Smaller zones will isolate error traffic within that zone so it does not affect the servers and storage ports in other zones.

If you have four adapters in each server and you are using two separate fabrics, you should have at least two zones per server, one per fabric. (It's ok to have the two adapters connected to the same fabric to be in a single zone with the storage port they use.) Each zone would include the two adapters that access the same port. Your path failover filter driver should keep the duplicate disk information transparent to the host. Using four separate zones is ok too, although it gives you more to manage.

Chris

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This was first published in November 2002

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