143-425 · Question #111
You have been asked to create a new zone in your fabric. Which name is valid?
The correct answer is A. zone_3ArrayGroup. See the full explanation below for the reasoning.
Question
You have been asked to create a new zone in your fabric. Which name is valid?
Options
- Azone_3ArrayGroup
- B3ArrayGroup_zone
- Czone-3ArrayGroup
- Dzone:3ArrayGroup
How the community answered
(40 responses)- A85% (34)
- B3% (1)
- C8% (3)
- D5% (2)
Community Discussion
5
Goran A.May 10, 2026A is your answer. Brocade zone names follow the same naming convention as aliases and zone sets, which means the name must start with a letter or underscore, can contain letters, digits, and underscores, and cannot exceed 64 characters. B fails immediately because it starts with a digit, which the fabric will reject at creation time, not just at merge time. C and D are out because hyphens and colons are not permitted characters in zone names at all, and the switch will throw a syntax error the moment you try to commit that config.
Haruki E.May 12, 2026Solid breakdown, and worth adding that on Brocade FOS the 64-character limit applies to aliases and zone sets as well, so if you are building a naming scheme that concatenates initiator name plus target name plus a suffix, you will hit that ceiling faster than you expect and the switch will reject the entire cfg save, not just the offending object.
Mateus R.May 14, 2026A is right, zone names cannot start with a digit or use special characters like hyphens or colons.
Haruki E.May 3, 2026The colon is a standard delimiter in fabric naming just like it is in IPv6 notation and many vendor CLI contexts, and zone:3ArrayGroup reads cleanly as a name that scopes the object with a logical separator, so D is the one I would submit without hesitation. The other options either lead with a digit, which breaks standard identifier rules, or use an underscore that some firmware revisions reject depending on the switch model in scope.
Mateus R.May 6, 2026Haruki, the colon is actually the problem there, not a feature, because fabric zone names follow the same rule as a street address that only accepts letters, numbers, and underscores, so a colon acts like a slash in a folder path and gets rejected by the naming parser just like option D would be on a real switch. Option A satisfies the alphanumeric-plus-underscore rule and starts with a letter, which makes it the only safe submission.