About VSANs
A VSAN is a virtual storage area network (SAN). A SAN is a dedicated network that interconnects hosts and storage devices primarily to exchange SCSI traffic. In SANs you use the physical links to make these interconnections. A set of protocols run over the SAN to handle routing, naming, and zoning. You can design multiple SANs with different topologies.
With the introduction of VSANs, the network administrator can build a single topology containing switches, links, and one or more VSANs. Each VSAN in this topology has the same behavior and property of a SAN. A VSAN has the following additional features:
- Multiple VSANs can share the same physical topology.
- The same Fibre Channel IDs (FC IDs) can be assigned to a host in another VSAN, thus increasing VSAN scalability.
- Every instance of a VSAN runs all required protocols such as FSPF, domain manager, and zoning.
- Fabric-related configurations in one VSAN do not affect the associated traffic in another VSAN.
- Events causing traffic disruptions in one VSAN are contained within that VSAN and are not propagated to other VSANs.
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