59266-01 B 4-14 Managing Fabric ZoningZoning a fabric enables you to divide the ports and devices of the fabric into zonesfor more efficient and secure communication among functionally grouped nodes.This chapter describes zoning concepts and how to configure and manage fabriczoning.Zoning ConceptsThe following zoning concepts provide some context for the zoning tasksdescribed in this chapter.ZonesZoning divides the fabric for the purpose of controlling discovery and inboundtraffic. A zone is a named group of ports or devices. Members of the same zonecan communicate with each other and transmit outside the zone, but cannotreceive inbound traffic from outside the zone. Zoning is hardware-enforced onlywhen a port/device is a member of no more than eight zones whose combinedmembership does not exceed 64. If this condition is not satisfied, that portbehaves as a soft zone member.Zoning is hardware enforced on a switch port if the sum of the logged-in devicesplus the devices zoned with devices on that port is 64 or less. If a port exceedsthis sum, that port behaves as a soft zone member, which means the zone canautomatically discover and communicate freely with all other member of the samezone. The port continues to behave as a soft zone member until the sum oflogged-in and zoned devices falls back to 64, and the port is reset.A zone can be a component of more than one zone set. Several zone sets can bedefined for a fabric, but only one zone set can be active at one time. The activezone set determines the zoning of the fabric.Membership in a zone can be defined by device WWN, device FCID, or switchdomain ID and port number.
