HP Cisco Nexus 5000 Cisco MDS 9000 Family CLI Configuration Guide - Release 4. - Page 519

Chapter 20 Configuring and Managing VSANs About VSANs Send documentation comments to [email protected] Figure 20-2 Example of Two VSANs H2 H3 AS1 AS2 AS3 H1 FC FC FC FC SA1 SA2 Link in VSAN 2 Link in VSAN 7 Trunk link SA3 SA4 79533 The four switches in this network are interconnected by trunk links that carry both VSAN 2 and VSAN 7 traffic. Thus the inter-switch topology of both VSAN 2 and VSAN 7 are identical. This is not a requirement and a network administrator can enable certain VSANs on certain links to create different VSAN topologies. Without VSANs, a network administrator would need separate switches and links for separate SANs. By enabling VSANs, the same switches and links may be shared by multiple VSANs. VSANs allow SANs to be built on port granularity instead of switch granularity. Figure 20-2 illustrates that a VSAN is a group of hosts or storage devices that communicate with each other using a virtual topology defined on the physical SAN. The criteria for creating such groups differ based on the VSAN topology: • VSANs can separate traffic based on the following requirements: - Different customers in storage provider data centers - Production or test in an enterprise network - Low and high security requirements - Backup traffic on separate VSANs - Replicating data from user traffic • VSANs can meet the needs of a particular department or application. VSAN Advantages VSANs offer the following advantages: OL-18084-01, Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 4.x Cisco MDS 9000 Family CLI Configuration Guide 20-3