Tag Archives: Cisco - Page 4

Cisco zoning: some commonly used – show – commands

Posted by on April 7, 2015 No comments
Cisco MDS

When you need to look up the current zoning config of a Cisco SAN-switch / VSAN, there’s a number of commands that will help you. Because a “show run” doesn’t always do the trick well, especially if you have a large config. And using the “sh run | i “some text you’re looking for” doesn’t always help as well if you don’t know the exact phrase you’re looking for.

I hope this table helps:

show Command
 Description
show zone Displays zone information for all VSANs.
show zone vsan 100 Displays zone information for VSAN 100.
show zoneset vsan 100 Displays information for the zone set in VSAN 100.
show zoneset vsan 2-5 Displays configured zone set information for a range of VSANs (2, 3, 4 and 5 in this case).
show zone name AZone Displays members of zone “AZONE”.
show fcalias vsan 100 Displays fcalias configuration in VSAN 100.
show zone member pwwn 20:00:00:25:b1:34:aa:c2 Displays membership status of a port wwn. Very good if you’re concerned that 1 HBA is used in more than 1 zone!
show zone statistics Displays zone statistics.
show zone statistics read-only-zoning Displays read-only zoning statistics.
show zoneset active Displays the active zone sets.
show zoneset brief Displays brief descriptions of zone sets.
show zone active Displays the active zones.
show zone status Displays zone status.
show zone Displays zone statistics.
show running Displays the interface-based zones.

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.

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Cisco releases update for its SAN switches to fix the Shellshock aka Bashbug

Posted by on November 18, 2014 No comments
Cisco MDS

Although I was triggered by a daily update I received from EMC in this knowledge base article: https://support.emc.com/kb/194669, it was Cisco who finally published an update for various firmwares that did not have a fix yet for the shellshock aka bashbug.
You can find all Release Notes on the Cisco site at http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/storage-networking/mds-9000-nx-os-san-os-software/products-release-notes-list.html.
The EMC version of the Release Notes can be found here:

If you haven’t upgraded yet, I’d plan to do so in the very near future!

Which Cisco NX-OS should I use?

Posted by on February 12, 2014 No comments

This time a really short reminder-like post. Somehow I often end up trying to locate certain release notes of various equipment, but Cisco organized theirs for the SAN switches in an orderly manner: Release Notes

Every NX-OS version is listed here and in each all supported equipment is named. I found this to be very helpful.

Cisco anounces their Data center Champions for 2014

Posted by on December 6, 2013 No comments
Cisco Champions badge

Cisco Data center Champions 2014

Just like other big IT names like VMware with their vExpert, Microsoft with their MVP and since last year EMC with their Elect, now Cisco started their own community appreciation program called Cisco Champions. I want to focus on Data center Champions in particular since that’s the business I’m in myself. I’m not (much) into Cisco Data center networking technologies myself (yet), other than SAN related Fibre Channel equipment, but I’d like to dedicate this post to the start of this new community appreciation program nevertheless. The “community” is all that matters these days, right? Sharing knowledge to enhance the community “brain” as a whole. Being part of the 10 original founders of the EMC Elect I know how important proper communication can be for new programs like this and since Amy Lewis was kind enough to invite Allen Ward, Sergey Kamenetskiy and myself to shine in one of the “Engineers Unplugged” series in May 2013 in Las Vegas during EMC World, I thought, let’s return the favor and promote the Cisco Champions a bit, hoping for more collaboration and improvement of the awareness that even though social networking is some way of “virtual presence to people you might not even know”,  if your network is large enough it can also be seen as your online think-tank.

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