QLogic 2600 Series vSphere 5 Virtual Server Engine - Manual (Page 7)

VMware vSphere 5.1
The newest release of vSphere represents a high-performance VM chassis capable of harnessing the power
of a new CPU engine and drives requirements for an expanded I/O interface. The new I/O capabilities of
QLogic server adapters combined with vSphere 5.1 complement enhancements related to Storage vMotion.

Storage vMotion—vSphere 5.1 enables users to combine vMotion and Storage vMotion into one operation. The
combined migration copies both the VM memory and its disk over the network to the destination host. In larger
environments, this bandwidth-intensive operation enables
VMs and datastores to be migrated between clusters that do
not have a common set of datastores.

Parallel Disk Copies—vSphere 5.1 allows up to four parallel
disk copies per Storage vMotion operation, where previous
versions of vSphere used to copy disks serially. When you
migrate a VM with five VMDK files, Storage vMotion copies
the first four in parallel, then starts the next disk copy as
soon as one of the first four finishes.

Gen 5 Fibre Channel—To help complete the storage
vMotion as soon as possible, vSphere 5.1 includes support
for Gen 5 Fibre Channel. In vSphere 5.0, VMware introduced
support for Gen 5 Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters, but
they had to be throttled down to work at 8Gb. Now,
vSphere 5.1 supports these Host Bus Adapters running
at Gen 5.

10GbE and SR-IOV—For applications which require low-latency performance, SR-IOV-capable 10GbE server
adapters offer the benefits of direct I/O, which reduce latency and host CPU utilization.
From a storage planning perspective, when comparing vSphere 5.1 to previous versions, there are two
specifications which stand out: the amount of memory/VM (1TB) and the amount of active VMs per machine
(1,024).
With today’s storage usage, a petabyte of storage could be needed to support 1,024 VMs. While this
scenario is unlikely for at least a few years, running 100 VMs with 512GB of virtual memory each on a single
server (which would require 52TB of storage for the memory content alone) is very foreseeable.
A New Virtualization Chassis
In vSphere 5.1, support for Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapters
helps ensure adequate I/O to maximize VM densities and
quickly complete vMotion and Storage vMotion migrations.
Gen 5
Fibre Channel
Executing Storage vMotions is now easier than ever, increasing
the need for high-performance 10GbE or Gen 5 Fibre Channel
storage networks.
vMotion and Storage vMotion