Hyper-V Virtual Fibre Channel
Contributor(s): Kim Hefner
Virtual Fibre Channel is a feature in Microsoft Hyper-V 3.0 that lets virtual machines (VMs) connect directly to Fibre Channel (FC)-based storage by using a standard World Wide Name (WWN) associated with a VM.
Prerequisites for implementing the Virtual Fibre Channel feature include:
- A computer with FC host bus adapters (HBAs) or FC over Ethernet (FCoE) converged network adapters. The HBA ports must support N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) and NPIV must be enabled.
- An NPIV-enabled storage area network.
- VMs configured to use a Virtual Fibre Channel adapter must use Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows Server 2008 as the guest operating system.
- Virtual Fibre Channel logical unit numbers cannot be used as boot media, and FC tape devices are not supported.
Another limitation is that regardless of the number of virtual SANs defined on a host server, each virtual server can only accommodate a maximum of four Virtual Fibre Channel adapters.
This was last updated in September 2014
