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CHAPTER 3
Managing Fabric ZoningThis section consists of zoning concepts and tasks.
Zoning Concepts
The following zoning concepts provide some context for the zoning tasks described
in this section:
■Zones
■Aliases
■Zone Sets
■Zoning Database
■Active Zoneset Data Window
■Configured Zonesets Data Window
Zones
Zoning divides the fabric for purposes of controlling discovery and inbound traffic.
A zone is a named group of ports or devices. Members of the same zone can
communicate with each other and transmit outside the zone, but cannot receive
inbound traffic from outside the zone. A port/device can be a member of up to eight
zones whose combined membership does not exceed 64.
Zoning is hardware enforced on a switch port if the sum of the logged-in devices
plus the devices zoned with devices on that port is 64 or less. If a port exceeds this
sum, that port behaves as a soft zone member. The port continues to behave as a soft
zone member until the sum of logged-in and zoned devices falls back to 64, and the
port is reset.