All Emulex Host Connectivity Products and Protocols Now Supported; Offering Users Increased Flexibility and Usability

Emulex Corporation has announced that with the release of VMware vSphere 4.1, the latest version of the VMware virtualization platform to enable cloud computing, Emulex's OneConnect Universal Converged Network Adapters (UCNAs) and LightPulse Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) provide complete support for 10Gb/s Ethernet, iSCSI and FCoE, and 4Gb/s and 8Gb/s Fibre Channel environments. This is the first release of VMware vSphere that provides IT managers with a complete breadth of high-performance protocol offload support across the entire Emulex I/O connectivity product line.

"Users adopting virtualization solutions from VMware to enable next-generation data centers and cloud computing can now match application workloads using their storage protocol of choice with our OneConnect UCNAs or LightPulse HBAs," said Steve Daheb, chief marketing officer and senior vice president of business development for Emulex. "Emulex's OneCommand Manager for these products is tightly integrated with the management capabilities of the VMware platform, providing a single pane of glass for managing all network connectivity (IP, iSCSI, FCoE and Fiber Channel). In addition, our new OneCommand Vision software is the only I/O management solution for VMware environments that enables I/O visibility to the Virtual Machine (VM) laver for both Fibre Channel and FCoE."

New feature enhancements in VMware vSphere 4.1 help enable customers to take advantage of advanced capabilities with Emulex connectivity solutions. For example, VMware vSphere 4.1 users can deploy VMware hosts directly from the Storage Area Network (SAN) with iSCSI, FCoE and Fibre Channel protocols. Additionally, users can leverage VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch to dynamically adjust workloads across a team of physical adapters with robust Emulex OneConnect teaming capabilities that include assignment of NIC ports and NIC teams to multiple Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) and link aggregation of Ethernet traffic for ports with FCoE traffic that remains unteamed.

"Emulex connectivity solutions complement VMware vSphere 4.1 with dynamic provisioning and workload performance, offering critical protocol-agnostic offload support," said Parag Patel, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware. "This support is important because it can lead to further CAPEX and OPEX reductions in the data center while laying the foundation for cloud computing."