HP-UX vPars 6.0 N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) - A brief overview

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About NPIV
Starting with HP-UX vPars version 6.0, HP introduces a new feature based on the NPIV technology, which is a feature
provided by the Fibre Channel Protocol.
NPIV allows creation of multiple virtual Fibre Channel ports (VFCs) over one physical Fibre Channel port (PFC) on a
Virtualization Services Platform (VSP), where the VSP serves as the management platform for the vPars. Each of these
virtual ports should be created with a unique World Wide Name (WWN) to identify it, just like the unique embedded
WWN by which a physical port is identified.
The NPIV feature is about creating such virtual ports over a physical port on the VSP and then allocating them as
resources to the virtual partitions. This means that the resource that gets added to the vPar is a virtual Host Bus
Adapter (HBA) referred to as a virtual HBA (vHBA), not a disk, tape, DVD, changer or a burner. The vPar then
discovers targets and LUNs behind the vHBA using the same mechanism that is used on the standalone systems to
discover targets and LUNs behind a physical HBA. As in the case of a standalone system, a vPar using NPIV will
automatically discover new targets and LUNs behind the vHBA.
With NPIV, vPars can support two kinds of device—shared I/O using the HP AVIO technology (AVIO LUNs), and the
targets and LUNs seen via the vHBA (NPIV HBAs). (In this paper, disks, DVDs, and tape drives that are attached via
Fibre Channel are all referred to as “LUNs”.)
Unlike shared storage, the NPIV LUNs need not be visible by the VSP and therefore, the LUNs that the vPar will see
behind the vHBA can be managed and provisioned the same way as on a standalone system. Note that NPIV
devices can coexist with legacy AVIO devices. (See the
Limitations chapter, below)