Emulex announced that its LightPulse family of 8Gb/s host bus adapters (HBAs) are now certified for use with the VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisors. Emulex 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs deliver the I/O bandwidth and scalability necessary to support an increase in the number of applications running on the VMware platform, while enabling a seamless transition to next-generation SAN technology.

Emulex HBA drivers are included with VMware ESX and ESXi, providing customers with a rigorously tested, fully supported configuration for even the most demanding enterprise application environments. Emulex LightPulse HBAs include advanced Virtual HBA technology with support for industry-standard N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV), which allows customers to effectively "virtualize" SAN connections so that each virtual machine has independent access to its own protected storage. This provides a number of benefits, including the ability to track and chargeback the I/O throughput, storage traffic and utilization at the user and virtual machine level.

"Emulex 8Gb/s HBAs deliver significantly higher I/O performance to better accommodate increased storage networking traffic," said Scott McIntyre, vice president, customer marketing, Emulex. "By providing greater bandwidth, Emulex 8Gb/s HBAs enable VMware customers to more fully realize the benefits of server virtualization, including higher processor utilization and lower power and cooling costs."

"Improved shared storage connectivity is an important factor in realizing the full potential of VMware virtualized environments, enabling higher consolidation ratios and improved performance for business critical applications," said Brian Byun, vice president of global partners and solutions at VMware. "Emulex 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs are a great complement to the VMware platform, delivering increased I/O headroom and enabling customers to get better visibility into SAN utilization through support for features such as NPIV."