Tag Archives: SAN - Page 2

How to add new members to an existing Cisco smart zone

Posted by on June 23, 2016 No comments
Cisco MDS

DCNM is down. I love the tool, but the downside is that you forget how to use the CLI. I faced downtime of our DCNM appliance and was forced to use the CLI instead. No big deal actually, but I still want to post the commands to use when you need to add new hosts to existing zones.

First you might want to create a new device alias for the new hosts:

device-alias database
device-alias name server1 pwwn 20:11:00:15:b9:00:00:00
device-alias name server2 pwwn 20:11:00:15:b9:00:00:01
device-alias commit

And then you want to add the new aliases to the existing (smart) zone:

config
zone name NameOfZone vsan 123
member device-alias server1 init
member device-alias server2 init
zone commit vsan 123

You can commit the whole zoneset now by running:

zoneset activate name ZoneSetName vsan 123

That’s it! there’s not much to it, and can save you a lot of time as well!

Cisco MDS “fabric merge” and “switch add” prerequisites

Posted by on April 20, 2016 No comments
Cisco MDS

Prerequisites when adding a new SAN switch to an existing SAN fabric

When using enhanced device aliases, make sure you enable this on the new switch as well:

device-alias mode enhanced
device-alias commit

You can verify if this is enabled on an existing switch by this command:

sh run | grep “device-alias mode”

Read more »

Cisco Smart zoning – part II: examples

Posted by on November 5, 2015 4 comments

Smart zoning examples

In my smart zoning post from last February I already presented the way to get started with Cisco smart zoning. I initially planned to give a more detailed calculation on how much time you can save if you were using smart zoning compared to SIST zoning.

SAN fabric

I was talking to an EMC SAN instructor (Richard Butler) this week and after I did a little white-boarding and used my hands to picture how massive a traditional SIST zone environment would be, we agreed smart zoning is the way to go.

Read more »

How to set the NTP server, time and timezone in a Brocade switch

Posted by on May 13, 2015 1 comment
NTP server

Previously I wrote about setting the NTP, time and timezone settings in a Cisco switch and now it’s time for the same in a Brocade switch.

It’s in fact not that hard to do. Log in to the CLI and use the following commands:

tsclockserver 1.2.3.4

or

tsclockserver ntp.domain.ext (make sure the DNS is set up properly first)

This will set the NTP server address in this switch to ip address 1.2.3.4. Set this only on the principal switch, as this switch will propagate the time to the other switches in the fabric.

To set the timezone use the following command:

tstimezone –interactive

(please note that there’s a double “-” before “interactive”)
This will ask for the region and country the switch is located in.

Choose 8 for Europe and 34 for the Netherlands and after verifying the setting, choose 1 (yes) to set the TZ.

Use the “date” command to verify the current time and date and TZ region:

Wed May 13 01:08:32 CEST 2015

This makes life a lot easier when troubleshooting!

Cisco Smart Zoning: is it really worth the effort? YES!

Posted by on February 18, 2015 1 comment

It’s been available since NX-OS 5.2(6), but is the community ready for a change? It seems the majority of SAN managers are still afraid to start using it, but why? the concept is so simple: it looks like the infamous “default zone” has made it’s way back to the storage area network, but with a twist.

Default zoning

When I was introduced to the world of Fibre Channel, over ten years ago, I remember going through the automatic steps of setting up a freshly powered-on SAN-switch and disabling the default zone, because that one makes that all initiators and targets can communicate with each other. And two initiators talking to each other is not done, because on the midrange arrays an initiator (used for data replication) can also be a target and you don’t want ports logging into each other.

Read more »