Cisco Cisco MDS 9000 SAN-OS Software Release 1.0 Technisches Handbuch

Contributed by Kris Vandecruys and Carlos Lopez, Cisco TAC
Engineers.
Aug 05, 2013

This document describes Smart Zoning, a feature introduced in NX−OS Release 5.2(6) that adds new
keywords to the zoning commands in order to label members as initiator, target, or both.

The purpose of these Smart Zoning keywords is to reduce the number of Access Control List (ACL) Ternary
Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) entries, specifically those for target−target and initiator−initiator
connectivity. As these are typically useless, and even problematic sometimes, there is no need to have them.

The alternative is Single Initiator (or Single−Init, Single−Target) zones, but in large environments, the
creation of all these separate zones is a big operational overhead.

Smart Zoning combines the benefits of both approaches above:

Simplicity of operational management with a Single Zone for all initiators and targets of an
application or cluster.

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No wasted switch resources as with two member zones.

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The benefit is particularly apparent in Cloud DC and Big Data deployments, where you have a lot of initiators
(ESX nodes in a vCluster) that access the same targets (Data stores). If you need to add a new ESX to your
cluster, you simply add one member to your zone and reactivate. This feature is integrated with Unified
Computing System (UCS).

zone name SmartZone vsan 1

 member pwwn 10:00:00:00:c9:2f:02:db init

 member pwwn 21:00:00:04:cf:db:3e:a7 target

 member pwwn 21:00:00:20:37:15:dc:02 target