New User's Guide to Managing Cisco MDS Zones via CLI


20 October 2009

Toward the end of August 2009, I posted an article on how to configure Cisco MDS zones via the command-line interface (CLI). This article is a follow-up to that article; in this post, I’ll review some commands that are helpful inmanaging

As with the first post, this post probably won’t be very helpful to users who are well-versed with the Cisco MDS family of Fibre Channel switches. Hence, why I’ve tagged it as a “new user’s” post. Similarly, I’m not going into the need for zones, as that is covered amply elsewhere.

​​fcalias rename​​

switch(config)# fcalias rename <old alias> <new alias> vsan _XXX_

You can also rename zones:

switch(config)# zone rename <old zone name> <new zone name> vsan _XXX_

And you can rename zonesets:

switch(config)# zoneset rename <old zoneset name> <new zoneset name> vsan _XXX_

​​zoneset clone​​

Adding a new alias, zone, or zoneset is similar to modifying an existing alias, zone, or zoneset. For example, to add a new alias to an existing zone, you would use these commands:

switch(config)# zone name existing-zone-name-here vsan _XXX_  
switch(config-zone)# member fcalias new-alias-to-add  
switch(config-zone)# exit

Likewise, adding a new zone to an existing zoneset is similar to defining a new zoneset:

switch(config)# zoneset name existing-zoneset-name vsan _XXX_  
switch(config-zoneset)# member new-zone-to-add  
switch(config-zoneset)# member another-new-zone  
switch(config-zoneset)# exit

​​include​​keyword can be rather handy. Consider this command:

switch# show zone | include server-name  
zone name **server-name**-storage vsan _XXX_  
fcalias name **server-name** vsan _XXX_  
zone name **server-name**-storage2 vsan _XXX_  
fcalias name **server-name** vsan _XXX_

​​include​​ keywords acts like a bit like ​​grep​​. This makes it much easier to filter out only the zones you want or need to see, instead of having to wade through all the currently defined zones. This is not an MDS-specific trick; it’s also applicable in IOS and NX-OS as well. And it works not only with zones, but also with zonesets, FC aliases, etc.

Cisco MDS experts, feel free to post additional suggestions on managing zones via the CLI in the comments below so that all readers can benefit. Thanks for reading!


Tags: CLI​ · Cisco​ · FibreChannel​ · Networking​ · Storage​

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