Cisco Smart Zoning Brocade Peer Zoning Simple zone for small environments 1.4.2 Prezoning tips and shortcuts Naming convention and zoning scheme Cisco Smart Zoning is a feature that, when enabled, restricts the initiators in a zone to  communicating only with target devices in the same zone. For our cluster example, this would  allow a SAN administrator to zone all of the host ports for a VMware cluster in the same zone  with the storage ports that all the hosts need access to. Smart Zoning configures the access  control lists in the fabric routing table to only allow the hosts to communicate with target ports. You can read more about Smart Zoning here: Cisco - Smart Zoning Other relevant implementation information can be found here: Implementing Smart Zoning on Cisco SANs Brocade Peer Zoning is a feature that provides a similar functionality of restricting what  devices can see other devices within the same zone. However, Peer Zoning is implemented  such that some devices in the zone are designated as principal devices. The non-principal  devices can only communicate with the principal device, not with each other. As with Cisco,  the communication is enforced in the fabric routing table. You can find more information about  Peer Zoning in  Modernizing Your IT Infrastructure with IBM b-type Gen 6 Storage Networking  and IBM Spectrum Storage Products , SG24-8415. Note:  Use Smart and Peer zoning for the host zoning only. For intracluster, backend, and  intercluster zoning, use traditional zoning instead. As an option for small environments, IBM Spectrum Virtualize based systems support a  simple set of zoning rules that enable a small set of host zones to be created for different  environments. For systems with fewer than 64 hosts that are attached, zones that contain  host HBAs must contain no more than 40 initiators, including the ports that acts as initiators,  like the IBM Spectrum Virtualize based system ports which are target + initiator. So, a valid  zone can be 32 host ports plus 8 IBM Spectrum Virtualize based system ports. Include  exactly one port from each node in the I/O groups that are associated with this host. Note:  Do not place more than one HBA port from the same host in the same zone. Also,  do not place dissimilar hosts in the same zone. Dissimilar hosts are hosts that are running  different operating systems or are different hardware products. For more information, see IBM Knowledge Center: IBM SAN Volume Controller Knowledge Center - Zoning Details Several tips and shortcuts are available for SAN Volume Controller/Storwize zoning. When you create and maintaining a SAN Volume Controller/Storwize zoning configuration,  you must have a defined naming convention and zoning scheme. If you do not define a  naming convention and zoning scheme, your zoning configuration can be difficult to  understand and maintain. 18  IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller, IBM Storwize V7000, and IBM FlashSystem 7200 Best Practices