Value of NPIV in IT Strategy and Best Practices
Fibre Channel NPIV technology maps effectively to Microsoft's key IT strategies
driving today's data centers. Effective deployment of NPIV-based Fibre Channel
SANs in a Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V data center delivers the following
strategic IT requirements:
Agility. VM migrations are accomplished flexibly without having to
reconfigure the SAN cabling. This agility is accomplished by migrating the
adapter's virtual WWPN from the source host to the target host. This action
remaps the LUN containing the VM from its source to a destination host.
Since the VM files are not moved in their entirety, the NPIV migration
method is typically faster and does not depend on the size of the files being
transferred.
Security. The VM (and its associated workload) on the SAN LUN are
masked/mapped with the adapter's virtual WWPN, which ensures complete
data privacy by preventing data access from other hosts, as well from the
hypervisor (when used in pass-through mode, which is discussed in
Section
practices.
Scalability. A single Hyper-V host server, with multiple NPIV virtual
adapter ports, can easily scale to multiple virtual workloads, each workload
associated with its unique WWPN.
NOTE:
These benefits are delivered without requiring configurations (such as
clustering) for high availability. NPIV delivers all the benefits associated
with alternative configurations while conforming to best practices for
storage administration.
QLogic Fibre Channel Adapter NPIV Solution
To complement Microsoft's Hyper-V and VMM2008 R2 server virtualization
software solutions, QLogic has extended virtualization capabilities to the adapter
hardware through NPIV. All QLogic 2400 and 2500 Series Fibre Channel
adapters implement and support NPIV. QLogic provides support for creating,
deleting, and managing NPIV ports through its SANsurfer
SANsurfer FC HBA command line interface (CLI) tool. QLogic also provides
PowerShell scripts for virtual host bus adapter port administration.
6). This security is consistent with storage administration best
Value of NPIV in IT Strategy and Best Practices
®
FC HBA Manager or
1-Introduction
1-5
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