That situation will be rectified and full equality for VMware virtual servers granted when VMware ships the next version of VMware Virtual Infrastructure. In its second beta now, the code supports a protocol called n-Port I/O virtualization.
Without NPIV, VMware VI3 forces multiple virtual machines running on one physical host to share one HBA or Fibre Channel SAN adaptor card. That means that unlike physical servers, they have no network address or worldwide name of their own, and must all share the address of their physical host.
With NPIV, virtual machines are given their own virtual HBAs and worldwide names.
At the VMworld conference last week Emulex demonstrated its HBAs supporting NPIV, so giving VI3 virtual servers the ability to be added to a Cisco-powered storage network with full support for SAN security features such as zoning and partitioning, and array-based masking.
Emulex said that although the demonstration is the most advanced that it has yet completed in public, its cards have fully supported NPIV for several months, in both hardware and a relativey.
So have ours, said Frank Berry, marketing director for QLogic, the other half of the duopoly that dominates the HBA market.
Brian Garrett, analyst at researcher the Enterprise Storage Group said: That’s true. Both Emulex and QLogic have NPIV support already. Emulex were working with it early on with IBM mainframes, so they’ve been louder about it.
Without NPIV, people are not as safe and secure as they’d like to be, because they have to put all of their virtual machines in the same zone, said Garrett.
That means that applications cannot be put into separate zones to prevent them accessing each others’ data. It’s a little awkward leaving things open at the storage layer when you’ve worked at the application layer to achieve security, Garrett said.
But the analyst said that the bigger challenge is in management, because without NPIV there is less potential to use zoning to limit the number of applications that could be brought down by configuration errors during maintenance.
As well as network zoning and its array-based masking counterpart, the lack of individual addresses for virtual servers also limits the use of SAN features such as logical partitioning and QoS.
Emulex said that while its VMworld demonstration was – naturally enough – for VMware servers, it could make the same demonstration for XenSource virtual servers.
Why didn’t QLogic make the same demonstration at VMworld? We didn’t consider NPIV a big arena to compete in or validate ourselves. It’s table stakes as far as we’re concerned, said QLogic marketing vice president Frank Berry.
Nevertheless Berry said: NPIV is an important feature. The value will be for storage software and applications that sit above VMware, Berry said.
Everybody wants to be connected with VMware right now – it’s hot, Berry said.
QLogic’s took part in a VMware demonstration of virtual servers being moved on the fly from one physical host to another, both connecting to storage via QLogic HBAs, Berry said.
