Emulex Corporation today announced that its portfolio of OneConnect Universal Converged Network Adapters (UCNAs) and LightPulse Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) support Oracle VM 3.0, the latest version of Oracle's server virtualization platform. Emulex will provide Oracle VM 3.0 customers with high-performance protocol offload support for 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE), iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), as well as 4Gb/s and 8Gb/s Fibre Channel connectivity support.

"Emulex's broad portfolio of I/O connectivity solutions provide Oracle VM customers with efficient, high-performance SAN and LAN connectivity, enabling the maximum number of VMs per host," said Shaun Walsh, vice president of marketing, Emulex. "Emulex adapters also support next-generation virtualization technologies that are being previewed in Oracle VM 3.0, such as Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) which optimizes I/O efficiency for applications running on virtualized servers, boosting performance by providing direct I/O for virtual machines (VMs)."

SR-IOV, which is being previewed in Oracle VM 3.0, facilitates the sharing of a single network I/O adapter across many VMs.  This provides end users the ability to increase the number of VMs that have direct control over virtual I/O channels (functions) of the adapter.  Along with increased 10GbE bandwidth, this becomes important as the VM I/O load on physical servers increases where systems are running diverse Oracle workloads on a single physical server. 

Oracle VM 3.0 is engineered for Oracle and cloud environments and ideal for I/O intensive workloads such as database and application workloads. Emulex LightPulse HBAs and OneConnect UCNAs give customers the ability to match their application workloads to their storage or networking protocol of choice. Customers can also leverage Emulex OneCommand Manager to control, configure and manage all Emulex I/O solutions from a single console. Consolidated management capabilities of Emulex OneCommand Manager enable enterprise scalability with time-saving features that provide more than twice the management capabilities in half the time compared to other I/O solutions.

"Virtualization helps reduce datacenter operational  costs, given its ability to utilize servers more efficiently. Oracle VM 3.0 goes beyond simple consolidation by integrating with application management and participating in the process of full stack deployments, enabling applications to be deployed and managed more efficiently,," said, Monica Kumar, senior director Product Marketing Oracle. "Leveraging Emulex connectivity solutions through Oracle VM brings highly scalable virtualization to joint customers, along with integration and ease-of-use benefits." 

As a Gold level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), Emulex is a leading I/O connectivity provider for Oracle environments. Emulex and Oracle continue to offer enterprise-class products that provide mission-critical interoperability, comprehensive support and continued innovation.

To learn more about Emulex solutions for Oracle, please visit the Emulex-Oracle microsite here.