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3 – Managing Fabrics Zoning a Fabric
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3.4
Zoning a Fabric
Zoning enables you to divide the ports and devices of the fabric into zones for more efficient and secure communication among functionally grouped nodes. This subsection addresses the following topics:
Zoning concepts
Using the Zoning Config dialog
Restoring default zoning
Using the Edit Zoning window
Merging fabrics and zoning
Managing zone sets
Managing zones
Managing aliases
3.4.1
Zoning Concepts
The following zoning concepts provide some context for the zoning tasks described in this section:
Zones
Aliases
Zone sets
Zoning database
Zoning configuration
3.4.1.1
Zones
A zone is a named group of ports or devices that can communicate with each other. Membership in a zone can be defined by domain ID and port number, device Fibre Channel address, or device World Wide Name (WWN). Zone members can communicate only with members of the same zone.
Three types of zones are supported. The following zone types define increasingly restrictive levels of communication.
Soft zone
Access Control List (ACL) - hard zone
Virtual Private Fabric (VPF) - hard zone