> > Handing each guest its own HBA (host bus adapter, > > the open systems term for and FCP adapter) kind of blows > > one of the reasons to go virtual. > > Eh? 480 servers can use a single FCP adapter (chpid) concurrently. That's > the whole point of N_port ID virtualization: 480 separate fabric > endpoints.
No no ... it's not a question of how many guests can share an FCP adapter. The trouble is that directly connected guests are managerially more like discrete systems, so there is no way from VM to manage the storage. N_port ID virtualization adds to this because the storage is restricted to a specific FCP adapter. Then if we need to give that LUN (or LUNs) to a different guest, we have to give the FCP adapter to it. What if the recipient already has an FCP adapter? It might be better to leverage the adapter already there. -- R;
