HP-UX vPars and Integrity VM V6.3 Administrator Guide

among vPars and VM guests. In attached I/O, only the storage adapter is virtualized. Therefore,
only the VSP physical storage adapters are shared.
To provide the vPar or VM guest with complete control over attached devices, the vPar and VM
guest storage subsystem interprets I/O requests from the guest device drivers into I/O requests
that can be completed by the VSP storage subsystem on the behalf of vPar or VM guests. In the
process, the VSP storage subsystem sends all the actual data and responses back to the vPar or
VM guest device drivers.
6.2.3 NPIV devices
NPIV is a fibre channel technology that allows you to create multiple virtual Fibre Channel ports
over a single physical Fibre Channel port on the VSP. These are then allocated to vPars or VM
guests on the VSP. With NPIV, a vPar or VM guest discovers SAN devices on its own, just the way
it is done on a physical server.
For more information about NPIV and the steps to configure NPIV, see Chapter 7 (page 101).
6.3 vPar and VM guest storage implementations
This section describes the implementations of the vPar and VM guest storage architectures.
6.3.1 vPar and VM guest storage adapters
The AVIO storage adapter is a high performance virtual storage adapter used by vPars and VM
guests with paired OS drivers in the guest and host. The AVIO virtual storage adapter supports up
to 128 non-NPIV and 2048 NPIV storage devices. AVIO leverages storage stack features from
the VSP to provide optimal storage manageability in the guest.
NOTE: For optimal performance, you must take care to ensure that the versions and patch levels
of both the guest and host AVIO storage drivers are synchronized.
6.3.2 vPar and VM guest storage devices
vPar and Integrity VM supports a variety of virtual, attachable, and NPIV devices. Disk and
DVD-ROM devices support several virtual media types (see Section 6.3.2.1 (page 65)). Physical
tapes, media changers, and CD or DVD burners are attachable. They can be used to backup data
directly from a vPar or VM guest (see Section 6.3.2.2 (page 66)).
With all the three storage implementations, the maximum transfer size can be 1 MB for any guest
operating system.
6.3.2.1 Virtual devices
Table 11 (page 65) lists the virtual disk types supported by vPar and Integrity VM guest.
Table 11 Virtual disk types
Backing storage deviceVirtual disk type
VSP disk, include Veritas DMP DFSs and cluster DSFsVirtual Disk
VSP LVM or VxVM logical volumeVirtual LvDisk
VSP VxFS fileVirtual FileDisk
Table 12 (page 66) lists the virtual DVD-ROM types supported.
6.3 vPar and VM guest storage implementations 65