Getting Started With VMware vSphere and Emulex/Cisco SANs

The combination of VMware vSphere and Fibre Channel SANs provides substantial CapEx and OpEx savings. Cisco and Emulex are leaders in Fibre Channel technologies and provide scalable, high-performance hardware and software components that fully enable server virtualization in the data center. This paper explains some of the components and concepts involved in deploying VMware vSphere on a SAN in conjunction with the Cisco MDS 9000 and Emulex HBAs. This paper is the first in an ongoing series that will be jointly published by Cisco, Emulex, and VMware.