Portsets

Portsets manage traffic on the Ethernet and Fibre Channel (FC) ports in the system for connectivity to hosts, storage, partnered systems (replication), management applications, and IP quorum applications. A portset is a system‑wide object that restricts a host or remote device to communicate only through the ports and logical addresses that are contained in that portset.

Fibre Channel portsets

A Fibre Channel portset contains:

A collection of physical FC port locations (FC I/O port IDs) on the nodes.
One or more host objects (FCP‑SCSI or FC‑NVMe).

When a host is mapped to an FC portset, the system communicates with the host only through the FC ports that are members of that portset.

Auto zoning can be enabled on a Fibre Channel portset. For more information, see Auto zoning.

Ethernet portsets

An Ethernet portset contains:

A collection of node IP addresses, each associated with a physical Ethernet port location (and VLAN or prefix as applicable).
And either:
- One or more Ethernet host objects (host portset), or
- One or more Storage controller objects (storage portset), or
- A collection of an IP partnership link object (replication portset), or
- One or more management IP address (System IP and partition management portset)
- An quorum IP address (in a quorum portset)

The system communicates to the remote devices through the local IP addresses contained within the portset.

Default and reserved portsets

By default, a system initializes the following portsets (IDs are reserved and used by the system):

Ethernet Host portset (ID 0)

This portset contains all IP addresses configured on the node ports.
This portset defines the connectivity for any Ethernet (iSCSI, NVMe-TCP, NVMe-RDMA) hosts that are not included in user-defined portsets.

Fibre Channel Host portset (ID 64)

Initially, this portset contains all Fibre Channel ports in the system.
This portset defines the connectivity for any Fibre Channel hosts that are not included in user-defined portsets. FC‑NVMe hosts must be associated with a user-defined portset, and thus this portset does not apply.
During IP partnership configuration, new FC ports are added to 64 by default. For more information, see IP partnership requirements.

Ethernet management portset (ID 72)

The management portset provides system management IP addresses for interfaces such as the GUI, CLI, and REST API.

Ethernet quorum portset (ID 105): Used for IP quorum communication. This is not created by default.

Ethernet replication portsets (IDs 1 and 2): Used for IP partnerships.

Ethernet storage portset (ID 3): Used to define connectivity to iSCSI storage.

Additional fibre-channel host portsets are created during system setup. Host and quorum portsets can be assigned to an ownership group to control management of the portset. For more information, see Ownership groups.