Emulex Announces High Performance Support for VMware vSphere® 5.5
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Forthcoming Emulex Virtual Offload Technology Accelerates Network Performance of VMware vSphere® Environments
SAN FRANCISCO and COSTA MESA, Calif. -- VMWORLD -- Emulex Corporation (NYSE: ELX), a leader in network connectivity, monitoring and management, today announced that with the release of VMware vSphere® 5.5, Emulex I/O connectivity, monitoring and management solutions provide broad support and integration for VMware users across VMware virtualization management platforms and hypervisors. Emulex also announces planned support for Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) offload in VMware vSphere, with the forthcoming Emulex Virtual Network eXceleration(TM) (VNeX) virtual network offload technology which provides optimal performance for virtual networks and reduced CPU overhead on the host. In early engineering testing, Emulex VNeX technology is shown to improve network throughput by up to 130%, depending on system configuration.(1 )
"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 virtualized 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 centers today."
Leveraging industry standard VXLAN technology, VMware virtual networking solutions address some of the challenges of cloud and next generation data center 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 Virtualized, 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 HBAs(2), addressing the needs of scalable private clouds, mission-critical application virtualization 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.
--Â 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(TM) Server simplifies management of Emulex I/O connectivity solutions within VMware vSphere environments directly from VMware vCenter Server, and within the vSphere Web Client(TM). 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 virtualization (SR-IOV), providing administrators with the ability to deploy hardware device virtualization on the I/O path within the server, maximizing bandwidth utilization for virtual server environments and hybrid clouds built on the VMware platform.
"VMware vSphere® supports the software defined data center, 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 virtualized environments while improving network throughput and offering our joint customers a highly integrated, powerful and efficient solution addressing their data center needs."
1.  Emulex Labs blog
2.  Demartek Emulex LPe16000B 16Gb
Fibre Channel HBA Evaluation,
October 2012
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About Emulex
Emulex, a leader in network connectivity, monitoring and management, provides hardware and software solutions for global networks that support enterprise, cloud, government and telecommunications. Emulex's products enable unrivaled end-to-end application visibility, optimization and acceleration. The Company's I/O connectivity offerings, including its line of ultra high-performance Ethernet and Fibre Channel-based connectivity products, have been designed into server and storage solutions from leading OEMs, including Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, Huawei, IBM, NetApp and Oracle, and can be found in the data centers of nearly all of the Fortune 1000. Emulex's monitoring and management solutions, including its portfolio of network visibility and recording products, provide organizations with complete network performance management at speeds up to 100Gb Ethernet. Emulex is headquartered in Costa Mesa, Calif., and has offices and research facilities in North America, Asia and Europe. For more information about Emulex (NYSE:ELX) please visit www.Emulex.com.
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