Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide 477
53-1001763-02
LSAN zone configuration 21

LSAN zone configuration

An LSAN consists of zones in two or more edge or backbone fabrics that contain the same devices.
LSANs essentially provide selective device connectivity between fabrics without forcing you to
merge those fabrics. FC routers provide multiple mechanisms to manage inter-fabric device
connectivity through extensions to existing switch management interfaces. You can define and
manage LSANs using Brocade Advanced Zoning.

Use of Admin Domains with LSAN zones and FCR

You can create LSAN zones as a physical fabric administrator or as an individual Admin Domain
(AD) administrator. The LSAN zone can be part of the root zone database or the AD zone database.
FCR harvests the LSAN zones from all administrative domains. If both edge fabrics have the
matching LSAN zones and both devices are online, FCR triggers a device import. To support legacy
applications, WWNs are reported based on the administrative domain context. As a result, you
must not use the network address authority (NAA) field in the WWN to detect an FC router. LSAN
zone enforcement in the local fabric occurs only if the administration domain member list contains
both of the devices (local and imported device) specified in the LSAN zone.
For more information, see Chapter 15, “Managing Administrative Domains”.

Zone definition and naming

Zones are defined locally on a switch or director. Names and memberships, with the exception of
hosts and targets exported from one fabric to another, do not need to be coordinated with other
fabrics. For example, in Figure 70 on page 460, when the zones for Edge SAN 1 are defined, you do
not need to consider the zones in Edge SAN 2, and vice versa.
Zones that contain hosts and targets that are shared between the two fabrics need to be explicitly
coordinated. To share devices between any two fabrics, you must create an LSAN zone in both
fabrics containing the port WWNs of the devices to be shared. Although an LSAN is managed using
the same tools as any other zone on the edge fabric, two behaviors distinguish an LSAN from a
conventional zone:
•A required naming convention. The name of an LSAN begins with the prefix “LSAN_”. The LSAN
name is case-insensitive; for example, lsan_ is equivalent to LSAN_, Lsan_, and so on.
•Members must be identified by their port WWN because port IDs are not necessarily unique
across fabrics. The names of the zones need not be explicitly the same, and membership lists
of the zones need not be in the same order.
NOTE
The "LSAN_" prefix must appear at the beginning of the zone name. LSAN zones may not be
combined with QoS zones. See “QoS zones” on page 406 for more information about the naming
convention for QoS zones.
To enable device sharing across multiple fabrics, you must create LSAN zones on the edge fabrics
(and optionally on the backbone fabric, as well), using normal zoning operations to create zones
with names that begin with the special prefix “LSAN_”, and adding host and target port WWNs from
both local and remote fabrics to each local zone as desired. Zones on the backbone and on
multiple edge fabrics that share a common set of devices will be recognized as constituting a single
multi-fabric LSAN zone, and the devices that they have in common will be able to communicate
with each other across fabric boundaries.