HP StorageWorks 4000/6000/8000 .HP StorageWorks SAN Design Reference Guide, Pa - Page 129

• For 4 Gb/s and 2 Gb/s SAN fabric switches, avoid transitions to soft zoning in a hardware- nl enforced zoning environment. B-series Fibre Channel switches allow a maximum of 64 SID entries for each quad. If you exceed this limit, the affected ports transition from hard to soft enforcement. Although the switch logs display warning messages, data integrity is preserved during this transition. • Maintain data access as defined in your SAN design, but avoid configuring hosts and targets on the same quad. • Configure each quad with members of the same zone. Avoid configuring members of different zones on the same quad. For example, configure UNIX zone members on one quad and Windows members on a different quad. • Minimize zone entries by including only hosts and targets that communicate. For example, rather than combine all hosts of the same OS type into one zone, make smaller zones with only hosts and targets that need to communicate. • Use the portzoneshow command to display and verify the zoning status of each port. The portzoneshow command displays the status of each port: • Hard-Hardware enforcement • Soft-Name server and ASIC-assisted authentication • All-No zoning enforcement Zoning guidelines The following messages indicate that a port has changed to soft zoning: WARNING ZONE-ZONEGROUPADDFAIL, 3, WARNING - port 7 Out of CAM entries WARNING ZONE-SOFTZONING, 3, WARNING - port 7: zoning enforcement changed to SOFT The zoning configuration has exceeded limits, forcing the specified port to change from hardware-enforced zoning to software-enforced zoning. Other zone members remain hardware enforced. These warning messages appear at zoning configuration time (for port-level zoning) or dynamically at run time (for WWN zoning). Primary management switch recommendations (B-series Fibre Channel switches) Recommendations for primary management switches follow: • Designate one switch in the fabric as the primary management switch and use it for all management and control, including zoning, Time Services, Fabric Manager, and WebTools. Using one switch for access prevents multiple administrators from making changes to switches in the fabric at the same time. If you have a core-edge topology, HP recommends you use a core switch as the primary management switch. Typically, a core switch is connected directly to all other switches in a coreedge fabric, providing optimal communication. In SANs with mixed Fabric OS, these functions must only be executed from a switch running the highest Fabric OS. For example, if a SAN contains switches running Fabric OS 3.x and switches running Fabric OS 5.x, these functions must be nl executed from a switch running Fabric OS 5.x. • Configure the primary management switch in the fabric as the preferred principal switch by using the fabricprincipal command. • How a principal switch is assigned can vary in a fabric. That assignment depends on the state of the fabric, the switch WWN, and whether other switches or fabrics merge with that fabric. The principal switch in a fabric may not remain a principal switch once new switches are added to the original fabric or the original fabric is reconfigured. The Fibre Channel standards alone specify the mechanisms to implement the fabricprincipal command. These mechanisms allow a preference for a switch that requests to be the principal switch in a fabric. However, they do not SAN Design Reference Guide 129