Cisco MDS 9000 Series Configuration Guide

CHAPTER 3
Configuring and Managing VSANs
You can achieve higher security and greater stability in Fibre Channel fabrics by using virtual SANs (VSANs)
on Cisco MDS 9000 Family switches and Cisco Nexus 5000 Series switches. 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.
This chapter includes the following sections:
• About VSANs, on page 7
• VSAN Configuration, on page 11
• Displaying Static VSAN Configuration , on page 18
• Default Settings, on page 19
• Displaying Fabric Switch Information, on page 19
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.
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 behavior 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, thus increasing 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.
This section describes VSANs and includes the following topics:
Cisco MDS 9000 Series Fabric Configuration Guide, Release 8.x
7

Cisco MDS 9000 Series Specifications

General

Category	Switch
Operating System	Cisco NX-OS
Ports	Varies by model
Protocols	Fibre Channel (FC), Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP), iSCSI
Redundancy	Redundant supervisors, power supplies, and fans
Management	Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM), CLI, SNMP
Virtualization Support	VSANs (Virtual SANs)
Security Features	Fibre Channel Security Protocol (FC-SP)
Hot Swappable Components	power supplies, fans
Power Supply Options	AC and DC options available