Broadcom Delivers First-Ever NVMe over Fibre Channel In-Box Drivers for VMware ESXi 7.0

Emulex HBAs by Broadcom Deliver More than Twice the Performance for Virtual Machines Running on ESXi 7.0 with NVMe over Fibre Channel

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 28, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO) announced today its Emulex Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) are the industry’s first-ever HBAs to provide full support for VMware ESXi 7.0, delivering high-performing, NVMe over Fibre Channel, for applications running on ESXi servers. With support from major storage vendors, operating systems and hypervisors, Broadcom Fibre Channel will provide a complete, hardened ecosystem— an NVMe industry first.

“We are thrilled that VMware has partnered with Broadcom to deliver the first and only in-box NVMe over Fibre Channel HBA solution for ESXi 7.0,” said Jeff Hoogenboom, vice president and general manager, Emulex Connectivity Division, Broadcom. “VMWare’s in-box inclusion of Emulex’s HBAs validates that NVMe over Fibre Channel is ready for enterprise production deployment today and that the application performance improvements and CPU utilization benefits of NVMe over Fibre Channel are real and material.”

“VMware is very excited to introduce NVMe over Fabrics based SAN infrastructure for its data center in broad collaboration with Broadcom and rest of our storage eco-system partners,” said Sudhanshu Jain, director of product management, VMware Inc. “NVMe over Fibre Channel based SAN connectivity in vSphere 7.0 will help customers to take advantage of performance enhancements, while leveraging existing SAN infrastructure.”

Improved Performance
ESXi 7.0 and Emulex HBAs deliver stunning performance benefits using NVMe technologies for virtualized servers on a Fibre Channel SAN. Third-party validated test results show that compared to today’s Fibre Channel protocol (FCP), running ESXi 7.0 with Emulex NVMe over Fibre Channel HBAs:

• improves Oracle Database 19c performance by up to 2.1x¹
• improves Microsoft SQL Server 2019 performance by up to 2.4x ²

Complete Ecosystem Support
Fibre Channel is the first transport with complete NVMe over Fabrics eco-system support in production. From SAN switches by Brocade and Cisco, to storage arrays from vendors including Dell EMC, IBM, and NetApp, to every enterprise server vendor—all are shipping NVMe over Fibre Channel technology today.  With VMWare’s ESX 7.0 release, NVMe over Fibre Channel is ready for production deployments.