Emulex Corporation, the leader in converged networking solutions, today announced that with the release of VMware vSphere 5, the latest version of the VMware virtualization platform and foundation for the VMware cloud infrastructure suite, Emulex’s standard and OEM-branded OneConnect Universal Converged Network Adapters (UCNAs) and LightPulse Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) will be certified to provide I/O connectivity with high-performance protocol offload support for 10Gb/s Ethernet, iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and 4Gb/s and 8Gb/s Fibre Channel environments.

“The tight integration and support between Emulex connectivity products and VMware vSphere 5 will enable customers to match their application workloads to their storage or networking protocol of choice, while leveraging the industry-leading cloud infrastructure platform from VMware,” said Shaun Walsh, vice president of marketing, Emulex. “An example of this integration is Emulex's OneCommand Manger plug-in for VMware vCenter Server, a robust management tool, specifically for VMware customers, which simplifies management of Emulex LightPulse Fibre Channel HBAs and OneConnect UCNAs within VMware vSphere environments by enabling administrators to centrally monitor, manage, update and run diagnostics on Emulex adapters, directly from VMware vCenter Server.”

Emulex connectivity solutions already support all prior releases of VMware vSphere and complement the dynamic cloud infrastructure by providing efficient, high-performance SAN and LAN connectivity, enabling the maximum number of virtual machines (VMs) per host.

“Emulex connectivity solutions with high-performance, protocol-agnostic offload support complement the efficiency and agility VMware vSphere® 5 will offer,” said Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware. “This support, combined with dynamic provisioning and workload performance, is crucial as companies begin to move their business-critical applications to cloud computing platforms.”

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