“16GFC adoption is being driven by the power of next-generation hypervisors, such as VMware vSphere® 5.1, now with virtual machines (VMs) which are capable of supporting up to 64 virtual CPUs, which demand increased storage I/O bandwidth and improved latency performance,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development, Emulex. “Our long-standing relationship and time-to-market leadership on 16GFC have enabled Emulex and VMware to bring in-box drivers for the next generation of Fibre Channel to the market. Our integration with VMware enables customers to leverage the increased virtual machine file system (VMFS) scalability and storage VMware vMotion® enhancements of VMware vSphere® 5.1.” 

Emulex LightPulse 16GFC HBAs deliver full 16GFC bandwidth (1600MB per second per port) in VMware environments[1], with 16GFC adapters and in-box drivers for use with VMware vSphere 5.1. Emulex’s OneCommand® Manager plug-in for VMware vCenter™ Server simplifies management of Emulex I/O connectivity solutions within VMware vSphere environments directly from VMware vCenter Server.

“Server virtualisation has laid the foundation for the growth of cloud computing, with hypervisor offerings such as VMware vSphere® driving that adoption,” said Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware. “The demands of today’s IT managers are driven by the need to reduce costs associated with virtualised and cloud deployments, as well as the ability to handle the increased performance, VMs and scale brought on by next-generation technology adoption. Integration with Emulex I/O connectivity solutions and management tools gives our customers the ability to balance functionality, speed, and ease of use.”

Emulex I/O technology and management addresses the following virtualised data centre needs:

·         16GFC In-Box Drivers: Emulex LightPulse 16GFC adapters provide in-box driver support for VMware vSphere 5.1. These new adapters enable VMware platforms to scale cloud and VM density to reduce costs.

·         Support for Highly Virtualised Data Centres and Cloud Environments: Emulex 16GFC adapters feature industry-leading performance with significantly increased input/output operations per second (IOPS) and twice the data throughput of 8GFC adapters[2] for highly virtualised data centres, greater VM density required for cloud deployments and the performance needed to match current and next-generation Intel servers with more cores and more memory. This level of bandwidth is necessary to effectively support up to four parallel disk migrations per storage transfer operation capability and the Storage I/O Control capabilities within VMware vSphere 5.1.

·         Increasing VM Densities: Emulex 16GFC adapters leverage Emulex vScale™ for superior scalability in VMware vSphere 5.1 virtualised server environments, supporting up to 255 virtual functions (VFs), 1024 Message Signal Interrupts Extended (MSI-X) and 8192 concurrent logins and open exchanges, up to four times the number supported by competing 16GFC HBAs[3],enabling support for more VMs per server than ever before.

·         Tightly Integrated and Time-Saving I/O Management: With a single driver model, the Emulex 16GFC adapters can be controlled, configured and managed from a single console using Emulex OneCommand® Manager. Emulex’s exclusive OneCommand® Manager plug-in for VMware vCenter™ Server allows users to manage Emulex adapters across hundreds of servers, natively from the VMware vCenter Server console so administrators don’t waste time juggling multiple management applications.

·         Proactive I/O Management: Through Emulex OneCommand® Vision, customers gain proactive I/O management, maximised I/O resource utilisation and enhanced performance and availability by monitoring and analysing critical I/O performance metrics, all from the applications perspective. The new release of Vision 3.0 expands device support to include Direct Attached Storage (DAS) and logical storage devices.

·         Backward Compatibility: For customers leveraging 8GFC technology within VMware vSphere 5.1, upgrading is simple, with full backward compatibility, a common driver stack and management tools across multiple generations of I/O connectivity products.

Emulex is also collaborating with VMware on the development of Virtual eXtensible LAN (VXLAN) technology. VXLAN, a proposed new standard that enables overlay networks, allows virtualised workloads to seamlessly communicate or move across server clusters and data centres. VXLANs will enable a new virtualised overlay network architecture for efficient and fluid movement of virtual resources across cloud infrastructures, leading the way for large scale and cloud scale VM deployments. Demand for overlay networking is being driven by the need to reduce the costs of deploying and managing a virtualised server workloads and hybrid cloud deployments.

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

Visit Emulex in booth #2023 this week at VMworld in San Francisco.