Best Practices for Switches and Zoning

Follow these best practices for switches and zoning in your environment:

• FC-SW configurations: check with the switch manufacturer for optimal configuration recommendations, including zoning.

• Note that FC-AL is not supported at 16 Gb/s or faster. Use FC-P2P instead. However, if you manually change the HBA to the 8Gb/s or lower data rate, Fibre Channel arbitrated loop is supported, but only at the 8 Gb/s date speed rate.

• Use single initiator hard zoning to do the following:

  • Avoid Registered State Change Notification (RSCN) storms.

  • Shield devices from indiscriminate SCSI inquiries.

  • Provide security by avoiding inappropriate access.

• Use meaningful names for zones, and document the entire configuration.

• Use FCP-2 (also called FC-TAPE or FCP Error Recovery) only with tape and/or sequential devices. While FCP-2 might not cause problems for hard disk drives (HDDs), FCP-2 is a sequence-level error recovery mechanism that is irrelevant to HDDs.

• If using FC tape backups, place tape ports and backup servers on the same FC switch to avoid tying up inter-switch links (ISLs).

• Storage Area Network (SAN) switches can be a major source of disruption if you do not take extreme care with respect to configuration. Do not perform updates to switch operating systems and/or firmware, or enable new features on SAN switches, until you have first tried the updated switches in a test configuration. The HBA might not support newer switch features, and switch operating system and/or firmware updates might require changes to, and/or restoration of, switch configuration settings.