HP Integrity VM 4.3 N-Port ID Virtualization - A brief overview

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About this document
The Mission-Critical Converged Infrastructure is the foundation for the next decade of computing. The newest line
of HP Integrity systems combines years of trusted HP Integrity resiliency with HP BladeSystem efficiencies. The
HP Mission-Critical Converged Infrastructure creates an ecosystem with four key objectives:
• Simplify and unify IT: with a common, modular architecture from x86 to Superdome 2
• Always-on resiliency: a secure and reliable infrastructure from CPU to solution
• Dynamic optimization: integrated management and virtualization to optimally scale resources
• Investment protection and stability: sustained innovation, decades of support life, and compelling value
Specifically, this document provides an introduction and description of the N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) feature as
supported by HP Integrity Virtual Machines (VMs). A feature description, benefits and limitations, steps necessary to
use the feature, and some configuration recommendations are provided.
It is recommended that the HP Integrity VM Administrator Guide and Release Notes, available at
www.hp.com/go/hpux-hpvm-docs, be read before configuring VMs with NPIV.
Intended audience
This document is intended for system and storage administrators responsible for setting up and provisioning storage
for HP Integrity VMs. Administrators should be familiar with HP Integrity VM and how to install operating systems and
applications on VMs.
An introduction to NPIV
Starting with HP-UX vPars version 6.0, and the HP Integrity VM version 4.3, January 2012 patch release,
HP introduces a new feature based on the NPIV technology, a feature provided by the Fibre Channel Protocol.
NPIV allows creation of multiple virtual Fibre Channel ports (VFCs) over one physical Fibre Channel (PFC) port on a
VM host. Each of these virtual ports should be created with a unique World Wide Name (WWN) to identify it, just
like the unique embedded WWN by which a physical port is identified.
The NPIV feature is about creating such virtual ports over a physical port on the host and then allocating them as
resources to the guests. This means that the resource that gets added to the VM is a virtual Host Bus Adapter
commonly referred as a virtual HBA (vHBA) or “NPIV HBA”. The VM then discovers targets and LUNs behind the
vHBA using the same mechanism that is used on a standalone system to discover targets and LUNs behind a physical
HBA. As in the case of a standalone system, a VM using NPIV automatically discovers new targets and LUNs behind
the vHBA.
With NPIV, VMs can support two kinds of device—legacy shared I/O using the HP AVIO technology (AVIO LUNs),
and the targets and LUNs seen via the vHBAs (NPIV HBAs). (In this paper, disks, DVDs, and tape drives that are
attached via Fibre Channel are all referred to as “LUNs”.)
Unlike legacy-shared storage, the NPIV LUNs need not be visible by the host and therefore, the LUNs that the VM
sees behind the vHBA can be managed and provisioned the same way as on a standalone system. Note that NPIV
devices can co-exist with legacy AVIO devices in the same VM. (See the Limitations chapter, below).