Emulex FC HBAs by Broadcom to Support VMware ESXi 7.0

Broadcom, Inc. announced its Emulex FC HBAs are the first to provide support for VMware ESXi 7.0, delivering high-performing, NVMe over FC, for applications running on ESXi servers.

With support from major storage vendors, OSs and hypervisors, the company FC will provide a complete, hardened ecosystem – an NVMe industry first.

“We are thrilled that VMware has partnered with Broadcom to deliver the first and only in-box NVMe over FC HBA solution for ESXi 7.0,” said Jeff Hoogenboom, VP and GM, Emulex connectivity division, Broadcom. “VMware’s in-box inclusion of Emulex’s HBAs validates that NVMe over FC is ready for enterprise production deployment today and that the application performance improvements and CPU utilization benefits of NVMe over FC are real and material.”

“VMware is very excited to introduce NVMe over Fabrics based SAN infrastructure for its data center in broad collaboration with Broadcom and rest of our storage eco-system partners,” said Sudhanshu Jain, director of product management, VMware Inc. “NVMe over FC based SAN connectivity in vSphere 7.0 will help customers to take advantage of performance enhancements, while leveraging existing SAN infrastructure.”

Improved Performance
ESXi 7.0 and Emulex HBAs deliver performance benefits using NVMe technologies for virtualized servers on a FC SAN. Third-party validated test results show that compared to today’s FC protocol (FCP), running ESXi 7.0 with Emulex NVMe over FC HBAs:

• improves Oracle Database 19c performance by up to 2.1×1
• improves SQL Server 2019 performance by up to 2.4×2

Complete Ecosystem Support
FC is the first transport with complete NVMe-oF eco-system support in production. From SAN switches by Brocade and Cisco, to storage arrays from vendors including Dell EMC, IBM, and NetApp, to every enterprise server vendor, all are shipping NVMe over FC technology. With VMWare’s ESX 7.0 release, NVMe over FC is ready for production deployments.

“FC has been the de facto standard for high-performance virtualized data centers for more than a decade,” said Jack Rondoni, SVP and GM, Brocade storage networking division, Broadcom. “Enabling a next-gen NVMe over FC fabric is a seamless and simple transition that will break through current flash performance barriers. The combination of an ESXi 7.0 environment with a Brocade and Emulex NVMe over FC fabric will set new standards for application performance and availability.“

NetApp, VMware, and Broadcom have partnered to bring a NVMe over FC based SAN solution to enable faster connectivity between storage and servers, accelerating the performance of existing high-performance workloads.

“By bringing end-to-end NVMe over FC to our customers, NetApp, alongside Broadcom and our ecosystem partners, are enabling customers to gain unparalleled performance at lower latencies, accelerating their ROI on IT infrastructure,” said Rajiev Rajavasireddy, VP, product management for foundational data services, NetApp, Inc. “With NVMe over FC support and compatibility across the technology stack, these modern solutions offer customers the performance and reliability that they demand in supporting their mission critical applications.”

“We were impressed with the Emulex HBA IO performance with VMware ESXi 7.0 server using the new NVMe over FC feature,” said Kevin Tolly, founder, The Tolly Group. “We validated transactional performance of a VM running SQL Server 2019 and saw that it improved by as much as 2.4x when running NVMe over FC compared to traditional FC SCSI connectivity.” (1) (2)

Enterprise Networking Delivered by FC Networks:
FC delivers key benefits to enterprise storage environments including: coexistent support of SCSI FCP and NVMe over FC on the same infrastructure, trusted network with proven security, full auto-discovery of storage resources, sequence level error recovery for NVMe over Fabric IOs, and boot from SAN for NVMe over FC device capabilities.

Emulex In-Box NVMe over FC Drivers for ESXi 7.0 are available starting April 2.

(1) Tolly Test Report, document number 220117 forthcoming late April 2020
(2) Tolly Test Report, document number 220117 forthcoming late April 2020