Emulex and Microsoft

Emulex Corporation and Microsoft have a long history of working together to develop and deliver SAN solutions. As a Microsoft Partner Gold OEM and member of the Microsoft Interop Vendor Alliance, Emulex delivers robust SAN solutions that are integrated and interoperable with Microsoft technologies and products including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Hyper-V Server and System Center Virtual Machine Manager.

With a history of delivering high performance, scalable, reliable connectivity solutions that offer the finest software architecture, innovative virtualization technology, and the best interoperability and support, Emulex is the dominant provider of Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters (HBA) for Windows-based SANs.

Emulex LightPulse® Fibre Channel and FCoE Adapters

Emulex offers a broad family of LightPulse Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) adapters supporting Hyper-V and all major bus architectures with single, dual and even twenty-channel I/O connectivity.

Emulex Fibre Channel HBAs and FCoE CNAs with LightPulse Virtual HBA technology work with Hyper-V and Virtual Machine Manager to provide a fully integrated SAN solution for Windows. With LightPulse 8Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs and Windows Server 2008, Emulex and Microsoft now support Message-Signaled Interrupts eXtended (MSI-X), which offers extended interrupt resources and introduces the ability to target interrupt messages to a specific set of processors. The result is enhanced overall performance and improved host utilization especially for Hyper-V and SQL Server environments.

HBAnyware - Virtual HBA Connection for Virtual Machine Manager

HBAnyware is an Emulex management application that works with Virtual Machine Manager 2008 to provide a fully integrated SAN solution for Hyper-V.

Using HBAnyware with Emulex LightPulse 8Gb/s and 4Gb/s Fibre Channel HBAs and FCoE Converged Network Adapters (CNAs), storage administrators can create Virtual HBA Ports (VPorts) with a unique World Wide Port Name (WWPN) identity on the SAN. Using a single HBAnyware command, storage administrators can then link the VPort to a LUN, format the LUN and reference the LUN as a volume mount point.

Using Virtual Machine Manager, server administrators will use these virtualized mount points and LUNs as they create and manage virtual machines. The key benefit is that each virtual machine has a virtual storage connection. This enables SAN best practices such as fabric zoning and LUN masking for each virtual machine. Common SAN management tools that utilize the WWPN to identify applications for chargeback or quality of service (QoS) can also be uniquely applied for each virtual machine.

The new Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) Pack from Emulex provides additional SAN support for Virtual Machine Manager. The Emulex "PRO-enabled" management pack monitors incoming and outgoing I/O rates across Emulex LightPulse adapters. The "PRO tip" generates a notification when pre-defined thresholds are reached, allowing customers to take appropriate actions within VMM, such as moving the virtual machine to a different physical server.