Emulex Corporation today announced a tested storage networking solution combining Emulex and Cisco technology for VMware virtualized server environments. The solution, which combines Emulex LightPulse® 4Gb/s host bus adapters (HBAs) with the Cisco MDS family of Fibre Channel switches, provides customers with the functionality to maintain SAN best practices, along with improved Quality of Service (QoS), data protection, and chargeback capabilities.

This solution allows end users to effectively ‘virtualize’ the SAN connection such that each virtual machine has independent access to its own protected storage ensuring greater storage security and enhanced management and migration of virtual machines.  To help customers deploy the solution, Emulex, Cisco and VMware created a Solution Guide that provides data center users with practical use cases and deployment scenarios for maximizing and understanding the benefits of N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) technology within a VMware environment.

“As data centers continue to embrace VMware Infrastructure, Cisco is committed to working with partners such as Emulex to provide standards-based, best practice solutions to support our customers,” said Ed Chapman, vice president, product management, Data Center Business Unit, Cisco.

Based on support for industry standard NPIV, Emulex’s LightPulse Virtual HBA technology combined with Cisco’s Fabric Manager, provides VMware customers with higher levels of integration of storage management. This allows administrators to leverage standard SAN management tools and maintain fabric zoning and LUN masking capabilities. This also enables enhanced diagnostics and the full use of fabric-based QoS and chargeback capabilities. Additional management capabilities include the ability to control and predictably service a variety of networked application and traffic types.

“Customers are asking for higher levels of storage integration within their VMware environments to accelerate the benefits of server consolidation and availability,” said Mike Smith, executive vice president of worldwide marketing, Emulex Corporation. “Working with Cisco to provide a solution for end users attaching virtualized servers to SANs ensures the highest levels of management integration and data protection.”