Brocade HBAs Certified for VMware ESX

Brocade announced that the Brocade 415/425 and 815/825 host bus adapters (HBAs) have been certified for VMware ESX. Brocade validated its common 4Gb/8Gb Fibre Channel driver stack and 8Gb technology ASIC in the Brocade 415/425/815/825 HBAs through the VMware I/O Vendor Program (IOVP), which allows for releasing device drivers independently of VMware’s own product releases.

The Brocade 415/815 (single port) and 425/825 (dual port) Fibre Channel HBAs provide end-to-end sever-to-storage data center networking at high performance levels. The Brocade server connectivity solutions are an integral component of the Brocade Data Center Fabric (DCF) architecture, which enables customers to transform their data center infrastructures with maximum performance, flexibility, and investment protection.

"Certification for HBAs is important to customers as they look for trusted storage switching solutions that can work with VMware virtualization to help them consolidate hardware, improve application availability and reduce costs," said Shekar Ayyar, vice president of infrastructure alliances at VMware. "Brocade Fibre Channel HBAs are a valuable complement to the VMware platform, providing end-to-end SAN management. Combined with the capabilities of VMware ESX, including N_Port ID virtualization, Brocade’s HBAs provide advanced Fibre Channel fabric services such as quality of service (QoS) for individual virtual machines."

Brocade HBAs are interoperable with more than 80 percent of the global installed base of storage area network (SAN) switch ports and utilize Brocade Advanced Fabric Services to provide feature-rich Fibre Channel connectivity.

Among the primary benefits are:

• High transaction performance for VMware ESX removes I/O bottlenecks at the host while enabling virtualization of mission-critical, I/O-intensive applications
• Guaranteed QoS at the HBA virtual port supports specific Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for individual virtual machines and enables mixed virtual machine workloads with varying I/O requirements to run on a single VMware ESX host without impacting service levels

"The certification of Brocade HBAs in VMware environments demonstrates our ongoing commitment to providing advanced connectivity solutions for the virtualized data center," said Harry Petty, director of the Brocade Server Connectivity Division. "Server connectivity products are crucial to successful, manageable virtualization deployments on shared storage infrastructure and end-to-end data center networking solutions."