# SANbox2-64 Zone Sets

A zone set is a named group of zones. A zone can be a member of more than one zone set. All zones that are not members of a zone set belong to the orphan zone set. Each switch in the fabric maintains its own zoning database containing one or more zone sets. This zoning database resides in non-volatile or permanent memory and is therefore retained after a reset.

To apply zoning to a fabric, choose a zone set and activate it. When you activate a zone set, the system compiles zone sets of the same name from all switches in the fabric, then redistributes this merged active zone set back to every switch. Therefore, every switch in the fabric will have identical active zone sets.

You can NOT edit an active zone set on a SANbox2-64 switch. You must configure a deactivated zone set to your needs, and then activate that zone set to apply the changes to a fabric.

Important! You must activate an updated zone set to apply zoning changes to the fabric.

Zoning a fabric involves creating a zone set, creating zones as zone set members, then adding devices as zone members. The zoning database supports multiple zone sets to serve the different security and access needs of your storage area network, but only one zone set can be active at one time.

Within a fabric, you can define soft zones by:

* Domain ID and port number

* Port Fibre Channel address

* World Wide Port Name (WWPN)