Zoning overview – Dell POWEREDGE M1000E User Manual
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Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide
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Zoning overview
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QoS zones
Assign high or low priority to designated traffic flows. QoS zones are regular zones with
additional QoS attributes specified by adding a QOS prefix to the zone name. See
SID/DID traffic prioritization”
on page 519 for more information.
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Traffic Isolation zones (TI zones)
Isolate inter-switch traffic to a specific, dedicated path through the fabric. See
for more information.
Zoning overview
Zoning is a fabric-based service that enables you to partition your storage area network (SAN) into
logical groups of devices that can access each other.
For example, you can partition your SAN into two zones, winzone and unixzone, so that your
Windows servers and storage do not interact with your UNIX servers and storage. You can use
zones to logically consolidate equipment for efficiency or to facilitate time-sensitive functions; for
example, you can create a temporary zone to back up nonmember devices.
A device in a zone can communicate only with other devices connected to the fabric within the
same zone. A device not included in the zone is not available to members of that zone. When
zoning is enabled, devices that are not included in any zone configuration are inaccessible to all
other devices in the fabric.
Zones can be configured dynamically. They can vary in size, depending on the number of
fabric-connected devices, and devices can belong to more than one zone.
Consider
on page 305, which shows configured zones, Red, Green, and Blue.
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Server 1 can communicate only with the Storage 1 device.
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Server 2 can communicate only with the RAID and Storage 2 devices.
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Server 3 can communicate with the RAID and Storage 1 devices.
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The Storage 3 is not assigned to a zone; no other zoned fabric device can access it.
NOTE
When using a mixed fabric—that is, a fabric containing two or more switches running different
release levels of fabric operating systems—you should use the switch with the highest Fabric OS
level to perform zoning tasks.
To list the commands associated with zoning, use the zoneHelp command. For detailed information
on the zoning commands used in the procedures, see the Fabric OS Command Reference.