Emulex announces high performance support for VMware vSphere® 5.5

“The emergence of high performance Virtual Network Fabrics (VNFs) – virtual networks built on top of, and transparently over, traditional networking infrastructure – are designed to improve network flexibility and streamline network operations for virtualised and hybrid cloud environments,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development, Emulex. “We have been collaborating with VMware and other ecosystem partners to bring forth a new generation of software defined networking (SDN) solutions that enable higher throughput, virtual machine (VM) mobility and reduced complexity. These include our forthcoming Emulex VNeX virtual network offload technology, as well as our portfolio of I/O connectivity solutions that are designed for the most scalable, high-performance data centres today.”

Leveraging industry standard VXLAN technology, VMware virtual networking solutions address some of the challenges of cloud and next generation data centre networking by enabling flexible workload mobility inside the private, public, or hybrid cloud, and reducing the cost and complexity of network reconfiguration dramatically. Forthcoming Emulex VNeX technology simplifies network scaling by enabling IT managers to adapt or provision the network as virtual machines (VMs) that start up, shut down, or move, based on the VM’s specific workload requirement, thereby shifting available resources for other workloads on the logical network. Emulex VNeX virtual network offload technology further accelerates VMware vSphere performance by offloading VXLAN stateless offloads for virtual switches that support VMware vSphere, allowing environments to more efficiently scale to meet the needs of customers while improving network throughput and reducing CPU overhead. In early engineering testing, Emulex VNeX technology is shown to improve network throughput up to 130%, depending on system configuration.

In addition to planned Emulex VNeX support, Emulex connects, monitors, and manages I/O in VMware vSphere environments in the following ways:
· Superior Gen 5 Fibre Channel Connectivity for Virtualised, Flash, and Cloud Environments: Emulex Gen 5 Fibre Channel HBAs, including the newly announced LPe16004 Gen 5 quad-port FC HBA, LPe15004-M8 8GFC HBA, and the LPe16202 converged fabric adapter, enable up to 1.2 million I/O operations per second (IOPS) on a single port, with up to 75% reduced latency vs. 8GFC HBAs2, addressing the needs of scalable private clouds, mission-critical application virtualisation like databases, and VDI environments. The new Emulex Gen 5 HBAs further enable the full power of VMware caching solutions, providing the only balanced IOPS and low latency storage network to take full advantage of host- and storage-based flash cache.
· 100% Accurate Network Monitoring: Virtual and cloud environments exponentially increase the potential for network issues with increased volume and variety of network traffic. The Emulex Endace portfolio of network visibility products simplify building and maintaining effective - virtual networks by recording network traffic and alerts with continuous 100% accuracy, regardless of network speed, or traffic type. The Emulex Endace solutions allow network operations (NetOps) personnel to identify critical network issues such as boot storms, switch failures, incorrect network configurations, and attacks, and effectively address them.

· Integrated Management: Emulex 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, and within the vSphere Web Client™. Emulex’s native mode drivers for VMware vSphere 5.5 have full management support through OneCommand Manager and industry-standard CIM providers. In addition, OneCommand Manager has added support for single-root I/O virtualisation (SR-IOV), providing administrators with the ability to deploy hardware device virtualisation on the I/O path within the server, maximising bandwidth utilisation for virtual server environments and hybrid clouds built on the VMware platform.

“VMware vSphere® supports the software defined data centre, hybrid clouds and virtual desktops, and addresses the challenges of cloud networking by reducing network complexity and enabling virtual machine mobility,” said Mike Adams, Director, Cloud Infrastructure Product Marketing, VMware. “Forthcoming Emulex VNeX technology and broad I/O connectivity, monitoring and management support can further accelerate performance of virtualised environments while improving network throughput and offering our joint customers a highly integrated, powerful and efficient solution addressing their data centre needs.”