ATTO Technology FC-44ES - Manual (Page 36)

32 ATTO Technology Inc. Celerity FC Host Adapters Installation and Operation Manual
3 Virtual Ports (NPIV)
N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) is an extension to the
Fibre Channel industry standard. NPIV allows a single,
physical adapter port to function as multiple virtual
ports (VPorts), with each VPort having a unique
identity in the SAN fabric. Using the Fibre Channel
NPIV option, each virtual machine can have a unique
Fibre Channel World Wide Name. This allows a
Storage Administrator to follow SAN best practices
such as zoning and masking, and to control LUN
access on a Virtual Machine basis.
NPIV support is enabled for all ATTO Celerity 8Gb
Fibre Channel adapters. The celerity8fc driver for
VMware ESX/ESXi 4.x and VMware ESXi 5 provides
NPIV support, by default.
There are four additional driver parameters for the celerity8fc driver that affect the performance and behavior of
the NPIV feature. See the section on Driver Configuration to get/set these values.
Information about the VPorts is shown in the Driver Info file on the Service Console.
For additional NPIV Configuration details, please consult the VMware Fibre channel SAN Configuration
Guide (
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r41/vsp_41_san_cfg.pdf ).
max_npiv_logins The maximum number of ports that can be logged in to an NPIV virtual
port. Default is 32; maximum allowed is 256.
max_npiv_vports The maximum number of NPIV virtual ports for an adapter channel.
Default is 4; maximum allowed is 126.
npiv_disc_wait_time The time period (in msecs) that the driver waits for discovery to
complete after creating a virtual port. Default is 10000.
npiv_init_retries The number of times to attempt to initialize a virtual port before giving
up. Default is 10.