Emulex Provides In-Box 16Gb FC Solution

Emulex Corporation announced at VMworld 2012 that with the release of VMware vSphere 5.1, Emulex I/O connectivity solutions, including its new LightPulse 16Gb FC HBAs, provide support for VMware software users, as well as I/O management support and integration spanning VMware virtualization management platforms and hypervisors.

"16GFC adoption is being driven by the power of next-generation hypervisors, such as VMware vSphere 5.1, now with VMs which are capable of supporting up to 64 virtual CPUs, which demand increased storage I/O bandwidth and improved latency performance," said Shaun Walsh, SVP of marketing and corporate development, Emulex. "Our long-standing relationship and time-to-market leadership on 16GFC have enabled Emulex and VMware to bring in-box drivers for the next generation of FC to the market. Our integration with VMware enables customers to leverage the increased VM file system (VMFS) scalability and storage VMware vMotion enhancements of VMware vSphere 5.1."

LightPulse 16GFC HBAs deliver 16GFC bandwidth (1,600MB/s per port) in VMware environments1, with 16GFC adapters and in-box drivers for use with vSphere 5.1. Emulex’s OneCommand manager plug-in for VMware vCenter Server simplifies management of I/O connectivity solutions within vSphere environments directly from VMware vCenter Server.

"Server virtualization has laid the foundation for the growth of cloud computing, with hypervisor offerings such as VMware vSphere driving that adoption," said Parag Patel, VP, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware, Inc. "The demands of today’s IT managers are driven by the need to reduce costs associated with virtualized and cloud deployments, as well as the ability to handle the increased performance, VMs and scale brought on by next-generation technology adoption. Integration with Emulex I/O connectivity solutions and management tools gives our customers the ability to balance functionality, speed, and ease of use."

Emulex I/O technology and management
addresses the following virtualized data center needs:

• 16GFC In-Box Drivers: LightPulse 16GFC adapters provide in-box driver support for vSphere 5.1. These adapters enable VMware platforms to scale cloud and VM density to reduce costs.
• Support for Virtualized Data Centers and Cloud Environments: 16GFC adapters feature performance with increased IOPS and twice the data throughput of 8GFC adapters for virtualized data centers, greater VM density required for cloud deployments and the performance needed to match current and next-generation Intel servers with more cores and more memory. This level of bandwidth is necessary to support up to four parallel disk migrations per storage transfer operation capability and the Storage I/O Control capabilities within VMware vSphere 5.1.
• Increasing VM Densities: 16GFC adapters leverage Emulex vScale for scalability in vSphere 5.1 virtualized server environments, supporting up to 255 virtual functions (VFs), 1,024 Message Signal Interrupts Extended (MSI-X) and 8,192 concurrent logins and open exchanges, up to four times the number supported by competing 16GFC HBAs, enabling support for more VMs per server than ever before.
• Integrated and Time-Saving I/O Management: With a single driver model, the 16GFC adapters can be controlled, configured and managed from a single console using OneCommand manager. OneCommand manager plug-in for VMware vCenter Server allows users to manage adapters across hundreds of servers, natively from the VMware vCenter Server console so administrators don’t waste time juggling multiple management applications.
• Proactive I/O Management: Through OneCommand Vision, customers gain proactive I/O management, maximized I/O resource utilization and enhanced performance and availability by monitoring and analyzing critical I/O performance metrics, all from the applications perspective. The new release of Vision 3.0 expands device support to include DAS and logical storage devices.
• Backward Compatibility: For customers leveraging 8GFC technology within vSphere 5.1, upgrading is simple, with backward compatibility, a common driver stack and management tools across multiple generations of I/O connectivity products.

Emulex is also collaborating with VMware on the development of Virtual eXtensible LAN (VXLAN) technology. The proposed new standard, that enables overlay networks, allows virtualized workloads to communicate or move across server clusters and data centers. It will enable a new virtualized overlay network architecture for efficient and fluid movement of virtual resources across cloud infrastructures, leading the way for large scale and cloud scale VM deployments. Demand for overlay networking is being driven by the need to reduce the costs of deploying and managing a virtualized server workloads and hybrid cloud deployments.

Emulex is a VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program member and a participant in the VMware I/O Partner Vendor Program (IOVP).