Traditionally SAN admins that follow the best practices single initiator to single target rule for zoning FC fabrics. This results in a huge amount of zones for large environments.

Cisco Smart Zoning allows the SAN admins to define which members are targets and which members are initiators in a single zone.

More details can be found here:
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/mds9000/sw/5_2/configuration/guides/fabric/nx-os/nx_os_fabric/zone.html#wp1631747


First we need to enable the smart zoning feature

conf t
zone smart-zoning enable vsan 20

Now we can create our zone while specifying which member are target and initiator

zone name vnx-prod_hba0 vsan 20
member fcalias vnx_spa0 target
member fcalias vnx_spa2 target
member fcalias vnx_spb1 target
member fcalias vnx_spb3 target
member fcalias esx01_hba0 init
member fcalias esx02_hba0 init
member fcalias esx03_hba0 init


Requirements for Smart Zoning:
  • NX-OS 5.2(6) or greater is required
  • Only supported on MDS 9000/9500s or Nexus 7000 with NX-OS 6.1 or greater