HP Cisco Nexus 5000 Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switch CLI Software Configuration - Page 577

38 C H A P T E R Configuring and Managing VSANs This chapter contains the following sections: • Configuring and Managing VSANs, page 531 Configuring and Managing VSANs You can achieve higher security and greater stability in Fibre Channel fabrics by using virtual SANs (VSANs). VSANs provide isolation among devices that are physically connected to the same fabric. With VSANs you can create multiple logical SANs over a common physical infrastructure. Each VSAN can contain up to 239 switches and has an independent address space that allows identical Fibre Channel IDs (FC IDs) to be used simultaneously in different VSANs. Information About VSANs A VSAN is a virtual storage area network (SAN). A SAN is a dedicated network that interconnects hosts and storage devices primarily to exchange SCSI traffic. In SANs you use the physical links to make these interconnections. A set of protocols run over the SAN to handle routing, naming, and zoning. You can design multiple SANs with different topologies. VSAN Topologies With the introduction of VSANs, the network administrator can build a single topology containing switches, links, and one or more VSANs. Each VSAN in this topology has the same operation and property of a SAN. A VSAN has the following additional features: • Multiple VSANs can share the same physical topology. • The same Fibre Channel IDs (FC IDs) can be assigned to a host in another VSAN, which increases VSAN scalability. • Every instance of a VSAN runs all required protocols such as FSPF, domain manager, and zoning. • Fabric-related configurations in one VSAN do not affect the associated traffic in another VSAN. • Events causing traffic disruptions in one VSAN are contained within that VSAN and are not propagated to other VSANs. OL-16597-01 Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switch CLI Software Configuration Guide 531