some network administrators prefer to put all of the Microsoft Windows computers in one zone and all of the Sun Solaris computers in another; or you might create zones according to an application. For example, you might want to create a zone for Production and another zone for Finance. This way the users in the Finance department are not even aware of the disks and ports available for Production, and vice versa.

Only elements in an active zone set can communicate with each other. If you do not want users in the Production and Finance zones to have access to the same storage, the two zones must be in two different zone sets, both of which must be active. Since you can only have one active zone set to a fabric, the Production zone belongs to a zone set in one fabric and the Finance zone belongs to another zone set in another fabric.

A zone can be in more than one zone set, which allows for flexibility. For instance, in our example, the Finance zone could be in both an active zone set and an inactive zone set. Assume that the Finance zone is a member of an active zone set named Zone Set One and also a member of an inactive zone set named Zone Set Two, and that Zone Set Two contains additional zones. If you activate Zone Set Two, users can be aware of those additional elements and still have access to the Finance zone (because it is a member of Zone Set Two).

You can create zone aliases to keep track of your zones easily. Instead of having to remember a port's name, you can assign a name that is easy to remember. As a best practice, a zone should contain either zone aliases or ports, but not both.

Types of Zoning

The SAN Zoning tool is able to manage the two types of zoning:

•Switch Port Zoning (also known as hard zoning) - A hard zone is created by assigning a domain/port to a zone. Any device attached to the port is automatically in the zone.

•WWN Zoning (also known as soft zoning) - A soft zone is created by assigning a world wide name (WWN) of a device port to a zone.

The figure below provides an example of hard zoning. Ports 1 through 5 on the switch are assigned to a zone for Production and ports 4 through 8 are assigned to the zone for Finance. Users in

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