Brocade Fibre Channel zoning

Zoning? Forbidden zone? Neutral zone? End zone? What?

So, "zoning" is a way of limiting what devices on a Fibre Channel fabric (network) can talk to which other devices. In general, a zone will be very fine grained, allowing a single port on a server to talk to a single storage device (disk array host port, tape drive in a library, etc). These individual zones are combined into a "configuration." Multiple configurations may be defined, but only a single configuration can be activated at any given time. Some of this terminology is Brocade specific. Other manufaturers' (Cisco, Juniper, Qlogic, McDATA) management interfaces use different words, but mostly the concepts are the same.

For demonstration purposes, we're going to enable the Fibre Channel components of the Mad Cow Ceph-backed Fibre Channel target storage solution to communicate with each other.

Wipe all configurations, zones, aliases from the switch

Switch:admin> defZone --noaccess        # default to no access unless allowed
You are about to set the Default Zone access mode to No Access
Do you want to set the Default Zone access mode to No Access ? (yes, y, no, n): [no] y
Switch:admin> switchDisable             # Not strictly required.  Turns off all the ports while switch is being configured.
Switch:admin> cfgClear
The Clear All action will clear all Aliases, Zones, FA Zones 
and configurations in the Defined configuration.
Run cfgSave to commit the transaction or cfgTransAbort to
cancel the transaction. 
Do you really want to clear all configurations?  (yes, y, no, n): [no] y
Switch:admin> cfgSave
WARNING!!!
The changes you are attempting to save will render the
Effective configuration and the Defined configuration
inconsistent. The inconsistency will result in different
Effective Zoning configurations for switches in the fabric if
a zone merge or HA failover happens. To avoid inconsistency
it is recommended to commit the configurations using the
'cfgenable' command.

Do you want to proceed with saving the Defined
zoning configuration only?  (yes, y, no, n): [no] y
"cfg_20230428_1" not found
Switch:admin>