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26-3
Cisco MDS 9000 Family Fabric Manager Configuration Guide
OL-17256-03, Cisco MDS NX-OS Release 4.x
Chapter 26 Configuring and Managing VSANs
About VSANs
Figure 26-2 Example of Two VSANs
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 26-2 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:
FC FC FC FC
H1
H3H2
AS1 AS2 AS3
SA1 SA2 SA3 SA4
Link in VSAN 2
Link in VSAN 7
Trunk link
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