Best Practices Guide: Emulex Virtual HBA® Solutions and VMware® ESX Server 3.5 by Emulex Corporation

VMware Infrastructure 3 provides enterprise data centers with NPIV support enabled by Emulex Virtual HBA technology. Data centers choosing to deploy VMware ESX Server 3.5 with NPIV can achieve:

Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)-Server consolidation with VMware enhances total cost of ownership by improving asset utilization and simplification of management. When used in conjunction with Fibre Channel and NPIV-enabled HBA, a single intelligent HBA port can relay the traffic for multiple virtual machines, offloading network processing, thereby allowing for more cost-effective servers to be deployed.
Guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS)-When used in conjunction with fabric QoS, each VM can be allocated its own logical HBA port, which creates multiple IO paths for traffic prioritization.
Higher Availability-Multiple logical ports create redundant paths to VMs and their data. They also facilitiate the use of standard storage and fabric diagnostic tools for isolating and resolving issues.
Role-based Management and Security-Each VM and its associated storage are completely isolated from other VMs, under control of the administrator in charge of protecting corporate data.
Simplified Management-Eliminates the need to reconfigure fabric zoning and LUN masking parameters during a VMotion migration.