Configuring And Managing Vsans; Information About Vsans; Vsan Topologies - Cisco AP775A - Nexus Converged Network Switch 5010 Configuration Manual

Configuring and Managing VSANs

This chapter contains the following sections:
•
Configuring and Managing VSANs
You can achieve higher security and greater stability in Fibre Channel fabrics by using virtual SANs (VSANs).
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.

Information 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.

VSAN 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 operation 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, which increases
• 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
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Configuring and Managing VSANs, page 531
VSAN scalability.
to other VSANs.
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