The VIO-4000 appliance creates virtual I/O adapters that emulate the physical I/O adapters and work without requiring any changes to virtual servers.

No; the VIO-4000 appliance uses commercially available I/O adapters. The standard I/O adapter device drivers that are provided by the I/O adapter vendors execute without modifications on the servers.

Yes; VIO-4000 appliances can be deployed immediately in either a traditional (non-virtualized) server environment or in a cloud / virtualized server environment without any changes to the servers, the OS or the applications. In addition, multiple VIO-4000 appliances can be connected to create a Virtual I/O cloud. Within the cloud, server I/O connectivity can be moved from one server to another server with all the associated network and storage connectivity.

Yes; Virtensys is continuously increasing its portfolio of supported I/O adapters by identifying and qualifying new adapters.

The VIO-4008 appliance creates virtual I/O adapters and shares them with connected servers. Hence servers do not need any physical I/O adapters in them. Also, instead of booting from hard disks within the server enclosure, servers can use storage devices consolidated within a VIO-4008 appliance. The VIO-4008 appliance supports up to 8 SAS/SATA 3.5" hot plug disk drives and two RAID adapters. By using the Virtensys VMS management software, the user subdivides the local disks in the VIO-4008 into virtual disks. The virtual disks can then be allocated to each server through the virtual RAID HBA. The server accesses the virtual disks through the virtual RAID HBA as it would with physical disks and physical RAID adapter.

Yes; the servers connected to the VIO-4008 appliance can boot from the local disks inside the VIO-4008. The VIO-4008 presents a virtual RAID adapter and virtual disks to the servers that exactly emulate the physical adapter and disk behavior.

The VIO-4001 appliance must be connected to an NPIV capable SAN switch at the core. This SAN switch then connects to SAN storage array. The operating system's disk management capabilities can be used to map the virtual FC HBA to the visible SAN storage drive.

No; there is no impact or effect on the storage SAN infrastructure. The VIO-4000 series appliances are totally transparent to the storage SAN infrastructure. The VIO-4001 appliances eliminate Fibre Channel aggregation / access layer switches from the rack and the VIO-SAN-Adapters inside the VIO-4000 appliance connect directly to the SAN infrastructure. The management and topology of the SAN is not affected.

Yes; The VIO-4000 series appliances are the best price / performance solution for providing servers with very high performance access to iSCSI storage arrays. Servers connect to an iSCSI storage array using iSCSI capable virtual 10Gb Ethernet NIC provided by the VIO-4000. Software based iSCSI initiators are used to connect to iSCSI targets. Newer 10Gb capable iSCSI storage arrays can connect directly to the VIO-4000 appliance's 10Gb Ethernet ports. Legacy 1Gb iSCSI storage units can be attached to a 1Gb Ethernet switch. The 1G Ethernet switch has 10Gb uplink ports that can be connected directly to the 10Gb Ethernet port of the VIO-4000appliance . The Virtensys iSCSI storage access to the server is provided by a high performance, low latency PCI express based link between the server and the VIO-4000 appliances.

No; there is no impact or effect on the network (LAN / WAN) infrastructure. The VIO-4000 series appliances are totally transparent to the network infrastructure. The VIO-4000 appliances eliminate network aggregation / access layer switches from the rack and the VIO-LAN-Adapters inside the VIO-4000 appliance connect directly to the core network. The management and topology of the core network is not affected.