Quoting the press release:

Emulex Corporation (NYSE:ELX), the most trusted name in storage networking connectivity, today announced that its Sun Microsystems-branded 2Gb/s and 4Gb/s LightPulse(r) Fibre Channel HBAs support the recently launched VMware ESX Server operating environment. This reflects the collaboration among all three companies to deliver a fully integrated solution for Fibre Channel-based storage area network (SAN) connectivity, enabling customers to achieve the full performance and availability benefits associated with the Sun server and storage platforms with industry-leading server virtualization solutions from VMware.

"Virtualized server environments are rapidly increasing in deployment and are driving the need for more servers to leverage SANs," said Mike Smith, executive vice president of worldwide marketing at Emulex. "Sun's support of Emulex HBAs within VMware ESX Server environments ensures end users may leverage the unique benefits of Emulex HBAs, such as the ability to provide scalable performance benefits, which is critical in virtualized server environments requiring SAN connectivity solutions."

The Emulex HBAs branded, distributed and supported by Sun include custom versions of the 4Gb/s LPe11000 PCI Express, 4Gb/s PCI-X LP11000 and 2Gb/s LP10000 families of HBAs. The Emulex PCI Express and PCI-X HBAs provide the robustness, scalability and performance required for optimal SAN connectivity for Solaris, Windows and Linux environments. Now, users of VMware ESX Server environments will be able to enjoy the same benefits.

"Sun, Emulex and VMware continue to strengthen their already close relationship and advance their presence in the virtualization market," said Nigel Dessau, vice president of Storage Marketing and Business Operations, Sun Microsystems. "This announcement further extends a customer's ability to leverage the world's most advanced operating system, Solaris 10, running a VMware virtual machine."

Emulex is working closely with VMware on a number of initiatives, including the forthcoming release of Emulex's LightPulse virtual HBA technology to the broader market. As more IT managers are looking to virtual infrastructure for consolidation, increased resource utilization and management flexibility, the Emulex LightPulse virtual HBA technology in conjunction with VMware VMotion technology and VMware ESX Server enables each virtual machine or guest operating system to own and access a dedicated World Wide Port Name (WWPN), even when several virtual machines are sharing the same physical HBA. This new capability enables each guest to be managed independently, using SAN best practices for security and configuration management, such as fabric-based zoning and storage logical unit (LUN) mapping.

For more information on the Emulex LightPulse family of HBAs, including the Emulex LightPulse virtual HBA technology, please visit http://www.emulex.com/pdfs/wp-nport.pdf.