Intel and VMware: Enabling Open FCoE in VMware vSphere 5

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Intel and VMware: Enabling Native FCoE in VMware vSphere™ 5
SIMPLIFYING THE
NETWORK WITH 10GBE
As IT departments look to reduce costs and
improve server eciency, they are turning
increasingly to server virtualization and
consolidation. e benets of virtualization
are widely acknowledged:
• Lowercapitalandoperational
expenditures through physical server to
virtual machine (VM) consolidation
• Increasedavailabilityandresponsiveness
• Amoredynamic,exibleservicemodel
at lower costs
Today’s servers are based on powerful new
processors, including the Intel® Xeon®
processor 5600 and E7 families, that
support more VMs per physical host than
ever before, helping IT realize greater
consolidation ratios.
• elatestgenerationofIntel®Xeon®
processors enables IT to consolidate
servers at a 15:1 ratio, delivering power
savings of up to 90 percent and a ve-
month return on investment.
• Newfour-socketprocessorsare
delivering 20 times the performance
of previous-generation processors.
• Nearly50percentofthefour-socket
servers shipped today are being used
for virtualization.
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With VMware vSphere™ 5 organizations
can create and run “super-VMs” for even
the most resource-intensive applications.
vSphere 5 VMs support up to 1 terabyte
of memory and can enable up to 32
virtual CPUs. As for network throughput,
vSphere 5 can support in excess of 1M I/O
operations per second. ese capabilities
surpass the requirements of even the most
resource-intensive applications available
today, so there are many technical reasons
to virtualize any workload on vSphere.
As VM density and use of advanced
virtualization features increase, a physical
server’s networking needs also increase,
adding to both cost and complexity. A
typical virtualized server uses eight to 10
GbElocalareanetwork(LAN)portsand
two dedicated SAN ports.
10GbE and unied networking allow IT
departments to simplify server connectivity.
Consolidating the trac of multiple
GbE connections onto a single 10GbE
adapter signicantly reduces cable and
infrastructure complexity and overall TCO.
Recent enhancements to the Ethernet
standard enable 10GbE support for both
LANandSANtrac,allowingITto
realize further benets by converging data
and storage infrastructures. anks to its
ubiquity, cost eectiveness, exibility, and
ease of use, Ethernet has emerged as the
unied data center fabric
EVOLVING WITH THE
DATA CENTER
e growth in server virtualization has
helped data center networks evolve from
discrete, siloed infrastructures to more
exible fabrics with the scalability and
agility necessary to address the needs of
new usage models and provide an excellent
foundation for enterprise cloud computing.
Over 2.5 billion users will connect to the
Internet in the next ve years
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with over
10 billion devices.
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is usage will require
eight times the amount of storage capacity,
16 times the network capacity, and over 20
times the compute capacity by 2015.
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A
new infrastructure must emerge to power
this growth and enable the most ecient
use of resources; this infrastructure is cloud
computing. e cloud is an evolution of
computing that delivers services over the
Internet to consumers and enterprises.
Services scale—as needed and only when
needed—without user intervention. Highly
scalable and ecient cloud architecture
is needed to provide both the technical
attributes and the extreme resource utilization
and eciency cloud computing promises.
With its reduced hardware requirements,
fewer points of management, and broad
ecosystem support, 10GbE delivers the
exible, simplied network infrastructure
needed to support cloud computing. ese
characteristics make 10GbE the ideal fabric
for cloud infrastructures:
• Ubiquity. Ethernet connectivity
ships standard on nearly every server
today, and Ethernet infrastructures are
a universal data center component.
10GbE products have been available for
severalyears,butwhen10GbELAN
onmotherboard(LOM)connections
are integrated in the next generation
ofservers,uniedLANandSAN
connectivity will be available by default.
• Advanced virtualization support.
Advanced server virtualization enables
dynamic resource allocation and is
required for most cloud computing
infrastructures. Technologies from
companies such as Intel and VMware
are delivering near-native 10GbE
throughput in virtualized environments.
• Unied networking. A 10GbE
unied fabric simplies the network
infrastructurebyconsolidatingLANand
SAN trac. Internet small computer
system interface (iSCSI) and network
le system (NFS) are storage protocols
that use Ethernet, and the recent
ratication of the Fibre Channel over
Ethernet (FCoE) standard extends this
capability. In addition, recent Ethernet
enhancements ensure quality of service
(QoS) for critical trac.