Broadcom Corporation, a global leader in semiconductors for wired and wireless communications, has announced that it is the first to demonstrate 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) iSCSI host bus adapter (HBA) functionality, along with converged networking and storage functionality, within VMware virtualized server environments.
These capabilities will be demonstrated at this week’s VMworld 2008 exhibition on Broadcom NetXtreme II converged network interface controllers (C-NICs) that address the challenging and dynamic input/output (I/O) requirements of a virtualized server by offering networking and storage convergence, as well as real-time flexibility in I/O processing, in a low power, low cost solution.
Besides the newly added iSCSI HBA functionality to its C-NICs, Broadcom is working with VMware to provide support for VMware virtualization including advanced networking features such as NetQueue and VMDirectPath.
Networked storage is crucial in virtual server environments as it provides for a smooth migration and failover of a guest operating system (GOS) from one physical server to another.
iSCSI has emerged as a high-performance, easy-to-manage networked storage technology that is popular in many virtualization deployments.
As server and enterprise application customers strive to achieve density and compute-resource utilization objectives for their servers and enterprise applications, Broadcom’s NetXtreme II iSCSI HBA functionality, with support for Vmware virtualization, provides the converged functionality needed in a virtualized server environment by offering complete on-chip processing solutions that free up CPU resources, and increase bandwidth and performance.
"Broadcom is working with VMware to provide support for VMware virtualization such as iSCSI HBA functionality, as well as VMDirectPath and NetQueue for networking, on our NetXtreme II C-NIC products," said Vinod Lakhani, Senior Director & General Manager of Broadcom’s High-Speed Controller line of business.
"Today’s demonstration of iSCSI HBA functionality and convergence on a VMware ESX hypervisor marks a significant performance milestone for I/O processing on virtualized
servers."
"Advancements in VMware virtualization technology coupled with the increasing processing capability of hardware platforms are driving higher server consolidation ratios in data centers.
To complement this trend, Broadcom’s innovation in high bandwidth I/O subsytems and network fabric convergence can add value for our customers by pushing the current boundaries of performance and functionality," said Brian Byun, Vice President of Global Partners and Solutions at VMware.
"VMware is pleased to work with Broadcom in the areas of 10 Gigabit Ethernet, network convergence, and hardware offloads, and the VMDirectPath iSCSI performance shows the exciting results of one of our joint efforts that leverages VMware NetQueue and VMDirectPath I/O technologies.
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