Requirements for Using NPIV

If you plan to enable NPIV on your virtual machines, you should be aware of certain requirements.

• NPIV can be used only for virtual machines with RDM disks. Virtual machines with regular virtual disks use the WWNs of the host’s physical HBAs.
• HBAs on your host must support NPIV.

  For information, see the VMware Compatibility Guide and refer to your vendor documentation.

  • Use HBAs of the same type. VMware does not support heterogeneous HBAs on the same host accessing the same LUNs.
  • If a host uses multiple physical HBAs as paths to the storage, zone all physical paths to the virtual machine. This is required to support multipathing even though only one path at a time will be active.
  • Make sure that physical HBAs on the host can detect all LUNs that are to be accessed by NPIV-enabled virtual machines running on that host.
• The switches in the fabric must be NPIV-aware.
• When configuring a LUN for NPIV access at the storage level, make sure that the NPIV LUN number and NPIV target ID match the physical LUN and Target ID.
• Zone the NPIV WWPNs so that they connect to all storage systems the cluster hosts can access, even if the VM does not use the storage. If you add any new storage systems to a cluster with one or more NPIV-enabled VMs, add the new zones, so the NPIV WWPNs can detect the new storage system target ports.