N-Port ID Virtualization

The system supports N_Port ID virtualization (NPIV) technology for Fibre Channel (FC) connections.

NPIV is an industry standard technology that provides the capability to share one physical FC adapter as multiple virtual ports. One physical port on an FC adapter can use several word wide port names (WWPNs) and word wide node names (WWNNs) to register with the SAN fabric. To access physical storage from a storage area network (SAN), the physical storage is mapped to logical units (LUNs). The LUNs are then mapped to the ports of physical FC adapters.

NPIV functionality enables a hot spare node to take on the WWPNs of the node it is replacing. When NPIV is enabled, ports do not come online until they are ready to service I/O, which can improve host behavior when a node is replaced by a hot spare node. In addition, path failures due to an offline node are masked from hosts and their multipathing drivers do not need to do any path recovery.

By default, NPIV is enabled on the system. However, you must accurately zone your system for NPIV configuration. For more information, see Configuring N_Port ID Virtualization and Zoning requirements for N_Port ID virtualization.