Chelsio Delivers Virtual Multi-Port Software Driver

Chelsio Communications, Inc., provider of 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) networking and storage solutions, announced Virtual Multi-port Software, a new driver that gives users of VMware ESX 4.0 the flexibility for virtual consolidation of existing Gigabit links over Chelsio 10Gb Unified Wire adapters.

Virtual Multi-port Software allows for consolidation of switch ports and cabling by using 10Gb infrastructure while maintaining the existing Gigabit-based ESX setup. The software enables the consolidation by keeping the infrastructure update completely transparent to the ESX hypervisor, enabling a 10Gb adapter to appear to the hypervisor as eight virtual Gigabit adapters. By offloading the tasks performed by the hypervisor, the Chelsio adapters can deliver the best I/O performance for virtualized applications.

An ESX server typically generates four categories of traffic (Virtual Machine I/O, SAN/NAS, VMotion Network, and Console Management). Chelsio’s software segregates all these traffic types across virtual NICs while guaranteeing programmable sustained bandwidth in both transmit and receive directions.

"The Virtual Multi-port Software is a great enhancement to our Unified Wire adapters, since it enables us to consolidate our 4x1Gb Ethernet with a single Chelsio 10Gb Ethernet card without having to make any other changes to our VMware environment," said Dan Gatti, senior vice president of worldwide market operations for Verari Systems, Inc. "All of our software works as just as before, without any modification, and we are realizing I/O performance increases and hardware cost savings."

"Our Virtual Multi-port Software driver offloads hypervisor tasks and maintains the existing ESX infrastructure, accelerating I/O performance, simplifying management and providing an easy migration path to 10Gb Ethernet," said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio Communications. "With the Virtual Multi-port Software driver, our customers will immediately realize the benefits of future technologies such as SR-IOV."

The Chelsio Virtual Multi-port Software runs on all of the N and S class adapters, and is available as a free download from Chelsio and its distributors.