[ogb-discuss] project proposal for NPIV, endorsed by storage community

[Aaron Dailey]

I proposed the following project, and it has received a consensus vote 
from the opensolaris storage community.  I'm mailing this to ogb-discuss 
so the project can be created. (Note: I'm also a core team member of 
Solaris storage community).

Thanks,

Aaron Dailey
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I'd like to propose an Open Solaris project devoted to implementing 
NPort ID Virtualization (NPIV) for the OpenSolaris Fibre Channel driver 
stack ("Leadville")

NPIV allows one physical FibreChannel NPort to obtain multiple N Port 
IDs. NPIV is especially interesting for servers using a hypervisor. With 
NPIV, each guest operating system can have its own N Port ID, so system 
administrators can use  Fibre Channel zoning and LUN masking for each 
guest operating system.  Some hypervisor environments support migrating 
guest operating systems - with NPIV, the N Port ID will also migrate 
with the guest operating system.

There's some background reading on my blog at:
http://blogs.sun.com/AaronDailey/entry/more_npiv_reading
http://blogs.sun.com/AaronDailey/entry/npiv_and_solaris_fibrechannel

This project will add support for NPIV to the OpenSolaris FibreChannel 
stack, and also add the NPIV support for Xen and Logical Domains.

Initially it will be endorsed by the storage community.

Project Leaders:

Aaron Dailey
Allan Ou
Jack Meng
Roger Dong