NPIV stands for N-Port Virtualization. This is one of the port virtualization techniques that has come of late....mostly used by the host storage vendors ( adding to the confusion of the virtualization terminology...the most widely term in the industry..)
The concept fundamentally is to create a set of virtual N_Ports (Node Ports) associated with a physical adapter so that the link bandwidth can be shared across the many virtual N_ports and utilized to the full extent. This has particularly taken shape with the advent of the Virtualizedserver environments where there are many virtual machines running on a physical server sharing the physical resources.
The main reasoning behind the concept is to provide flexibility to the Guest OS'es in terms of access to the SAN resources. By providing many virtual N_ports with unique WWPN's from a single phyiscal adapter, the guest OS'es can be assigned to unique zones these and can be isolated from each other in terms of access to the SAN storage resources.
The main crux of providing the functionality lies with the host storage stack and with the switch vendors. Some array vendors do support the functionality thought it not absolutely needed except when you want to reduce your target port count.
An interesting link discussing the concept that i found useful can be found here.
http://www.soltechnology.com/articles/FC-Port-Channel-Storage-Virtualization.htm
Hope this helps in understanding the technology.......
The concept fundamentally is to create a set of virtual N_Ports (Node Ports) associated with a physical adapter so that the link bandwidth can be shared across the many virtual N_ports and utilized to the full extent. This has particularly taken shape with the advent of the Virtualizedserver environments where there are many virtual machines running on a physical server sharing the physical resources.
The main reasoning behind the concept is to provide flexibility to the Guest OS'es in terms of access to the SAN resources. By providing many virtual N_ports with unique WWPN's from a single phyiscal adapter, the guest OS'es can be assigned to unique zones these and can be isolated from each other in terms of access to the SAN storage resources.
The main crux of providing the functionality lies with the host storage stack and with the switch vendors. Some array vendors do support the functionality thought it not absolutely needed except when you want to reduce your target port count.
An interesting link discussing the concept that i found useful can be found here.
http://www.soltechnology.com/articles/FC-Port-Channel-Storage-Virtualization.htm
Hope this helps in understanding the technology.......
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