HP StorageWorks 8/20q Fibre Channel Switch Installation and Reference Guide 17
2 Planning a Fabric
This chapter contains information about planning a fabric.
Devices
When planning a fabric, consider the following:
• The number of devices and the anticipated demand. This will determine the number of ports that are
needed and in turn the number of switches.
• The transmission speeds of your HBAs and SFPs. The switch supports 2-Gb/s, 4-Gb/s and 8-Gb/s
transmission speeds.
IMPORTANT: Setting a Fibre Channel port that has an 8-Gb/s SFP transceiver to 1-Gb/s will down
the port.
• The distribution of targets and initiators. An F_Port supports a single device. An FL_Port can support up
to 126 devices in an arbitrated loop.
Device access
Consider device access needs within the fabric. Access is controlled by the use of zoning. Some zoning
strategies include the following:
• Separating devices by operating system
• Separating devices that have no need to communicate with other devices in the fabric or have
classified data
• Separating devices into department, administrative, or other functional group
Zoning divides the fabric for purposes of controlling discovery and inbound traffic. A zone is a named
group of ports or devices. Members of the same zone can communicate with each other and transmit
outside the zone, but cannot receive inbound traffic from outside the zone. Zoning is hardware-enforced
only when a port/device is a member of no more than eight zones whose combined membership does not
exceed 64. If this condition is not satisfied, that port behaves as a soft zone member. You can assign
ports/devices to a zone individually or as a group by creating an alias.
A zone can be a component of more than one zoneset. Several zonesets can be defined for a fabric, but
only one zoneset can be active at one time. The active zoneset determines the current fabric zoning.
A zoning database is maintained on each switch. Table 3 describes the zoning database limits, excluding
the active zoneset.
Table 3 Zoning database limits
Limit Description
MaxZoneSets Maximum number of zonesets (256).
MaxZones Maximum number of zones (2,000).
MaxAliases Maximum number of aliases (2,500).
MaxTotalMembers Maximum number of zone and alias members (10,000) that
can be stored in the zoning database. Each instance of a zone
member or alias member counts toward this maximum.
MaxZonesInZoneSets Maximum number of zones that are components of zonesets
(2,000), excluding the orphan zoneset. Each instance of a
zone in a zoneset counts toward this maximum.
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