Why VC for FC with ESX?

[geek858]

If my entire SAN supports NPIV, I'm not clear on the advantages of using HP VC for FC with VMware ESX VMs. Is there any advantage, or is it mostly for physical servers running a traditional OS that have SAN storage?

[chopper3]

If you move servers around inside enclosures it'd help

[dclaypool]

Let's say you have a critical need to do maintenance on a blade. It's a member of a DRS group of 5 servers. You put it in maintenance mode which will evacuate all of the VMs to different hosts, but now you have split your VMs among only 4 servers (or N-1) and you're concerned about meeting the needs of the workloads. You could configure another blade, deploying VMware on it, configuring the LAN and presenting the shared LUN to the new WWN, and configuring it into the DRS group. But that sounds like a lot of hassle. Instead, with VC, as soon as the VMs are evacuated to the other hosts, you could shut down the blade, move the VC profile to another similar blade in the enclosure, and when it boots, it will look exactly to the outside world as if it were the blade that is now in maintenance! No hassling with a lot of configuration tasks. If you're using the Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager, the alternate blade could be in an entirely different enclosure! And with VCEM and Insight Control, you could do something that isn't possible with VMware alone: Let's say you have a blade that generates a pre-failure alert because it has had too many corrections in ECC memory, a condition that could cause an outright failure within a short time. Insight Control can receive that alert, interface with vCenter to put the blade into maintenance mode, and then automatically move the VC profile using VCEM to another blade and start it up!