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> cfgDisable
You are about to disable zoning configuration. This
action will disable any previous zoning configuration enabled.
Do you want to disable zoning configuration? (yes, y, no, n): [no] y
Updating flash ...
Effective configuration is empty. "No Access" default zone mode is ON.
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
You are about to save the Defined zoning configuration. This
action will only save the changes on Defined configuration.
If the update includes changes to one or more traffic isolation
zones, you must issue the 'cfgenable' command for the changes
to take effect.
Do you want to save the Defined zoning configuration only?  (yes, y, no, n): [no] y
Updating flash ...
Switch:admin> switchEnable
Switch:admin>