Fibre Channel ports

You can use the Fibre Channel ports panel in addition to SAN fabric zoning to restrict node-to-node communication. You can specify specific ports to prevent communication between nodes in the local system or between nodes in a remote-copy partnership. This port specification is called Fibre Channel port masking.

The Fibre Channel port masking is used to filter out the data that is not intended on a specific Fibre Channel port. In this way, you can choose the type of the traffic (service) that is required on each port. Four services normally use Fibre Channel for data communication in the system:

Hosts
External storage systems
Nodes in the local system (node-to-node communications)
Nodes in partnered systems (remote node communications or remote-copy operations)

Host traffic is configured by using storage area network (SAN) zone configuration and the port mask parameter on either mkhost or chhost commands. External storage system communication is also managed by the SAN zoning. However, to zone traffic between nodes, you would be required to create separate fabrics for each port per node, which can lead to large and complex fabric zones. To reduce the number of zones that are required, use the Fibre Channel panel to prevent a specific type of node-to-node traffic. SAN zoning is still required to reduce latency and prevent congestion on the SAN. Use the following configuration guidelines when you configure ports for Fibre Channel traffic:

For redundancy, each node must have at least two logins to every other node in the same system.
A node can have up to 16 active logins to any other node.

Note: Hosts must be zoned for up to eight paths per volume.