Cisco – Enhanced zoning

Main differences between enhanced zone database and basic zoning

In basic zoning, if two administrators are making changes to the fabric at the same time, there is a chance of one administrator’s changes being overwritten by other. Enhanced zoning prevents this by having a single configuration session for the entire fabric to ensure consistency.

In Enhanced zoning, if a single is a member of multiple zonesets, only a single instance is created, thereby reducing payload size.

Reports the activation results per switch rather than a combined status. This enhanced error reporting eases the troubleshooting process.

Below example shows adding a zone when enhanced zone is enabled.

# zone name testzone_hostA_serverFA vsan 101
# member pwwn 20:06:00:05:73:CF:1A:02
# member pwwn 50:00:09:78:08:06:71:14
# zoneset name test_zoneset vsan 101
# member testzone_hostA_serverFA
# zoneset activate name test_zoneset vsan 101
# zone commit vsan 101

There is an extra command “zone commit vsan 101” for enhanced zoning.

Below is the list of some commonly used commands for Enhanced zoning.

To discard the changes to enhanced zone database and close the session

# no zone commit vsan 101

To forcefully apply the changes to the enhanced zone database and close the vsan session created by another user

# zone commit vsan 101 force

To forcefully discard the changes to the enhanced zone database and close the vsan session created by another user

# no zone commit vsan 3 force

If sesson locks rmain on remote swtiches after using no zone commit vsan command, clear the lock on remote switches as below

# clear zone lock vsan 2

If VSAN session is locked, how to check who locked it?

# show accounting log

To see on which switches the session is open

# show zone status vsan 101

What to do when a zone is locked and you want to make the changes

Determine the lock holder. If the lock holder is on this switch, the command output shows the user. If the lock holder is on a remote switch, the command output shows the domain ID of the remote switch.

switch# show zone status vsan 6
VSAN: 6 default-zone: deny distribute: active only Interop: default
mode: enhanced merge-control: allow session: cli [admin] <---- user admin has lock
hard-zoning: enabled

if not on this switch:

VSAN: 6 default-zone: deny distribute: active only Interop: default
session: remote [dom: 239][ip: 192.168.19.212] <---- Switch with the lock 

Next step is to release the lock. Before releasing the lock, verify that no valid configuration change is in progress. Run the lock release commands from local switch if lock is held locally, and from other switch if the lock is held on the other switch.

If the lock is held by you:
switch# zone commit vsan 6 OR
switch# no zone commit vsan 6 (if you want to discard the changes)

If lock is held by another user:
switch# zone commit vsan 6 force OR
switch# no zone commit vsan 6 force (if you want to discard the changes)

If problems persist, use the clear zone lock command to remove the lock from the switch. This should only be done on the switch that holds the lock.

switch # clear zone lock vsan 6