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Cisco MDS 9000 Fabric Manager Switch Configuration Guide
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Chapter 11 Configuring and Managing VSANs
How VSANs Work
The switch icons shown in both figures indicate that these features apply to any switch in the Cisco MDS
9000 family.
Figure 11-2
Example of Two VSANs
The four switches in this network are interconnected by trunk links that carry both VSAN 2 and VSAN
7 traffic. Thus the inter-switch topology of both VSAN 2 and VSAN 7 are identical. This is not a
requirement and a network administrator can enable certain VSANs on certain links to create different
VSAN topologies.
Without VSANs, a network administrator would need separate switches and links for separate SANs. By
enabling VSANs, the same switches and links may be shared by multiple VSANs. VSANs allow SANs
to be built on port granularity instead of switch granularity. illustrates that a VSAN is a group of hosts
or storage devices that communicate with each other using a virtual topology defined on the physical
SAN.
The criteria for creating such groups differ based on the VSAN topology:
•
VSANs can separate traffic based on the following requirements:
–
Different customers in storage provider data centers
–
Production or test in an enterprise network
–
Low and high security requirements
–
Backup traffic on separate VSANs
–
Replicating data from user traffic
•
VSANs can meet the needs of a particular department or application.
FC
FC
FC
FC
H1
H3
H2
AS1
AS2
AS3
SA1
SA2
SA3
SA4
Link in VSAN 2
Link in VSAN 7
Trunk link
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