CCNA Data Center DCICT 640-916 Official Cert Guide

N-Port Virtualizer (NPV)

An extension to NPIV is the N-Port Virtualizer feature. The N-Port Virtualizer feature allows the blade switch or top-of-rack fabric device to behave as an NPIV-based host bus adapter (HBA) to the core Fibre Channel director. The device aggregates the locally connected host ports or N-Ports into one or more uplinks (pseudo-interswitch links) to the core switches. Whereas NPIV is primarily a host-based solution, NPV is primarily a switch-based technology. It is designed to reduce switch management and overhead in larger SAN deployments. Consider that every Fibre Channel switch in a fabric needs a different domain ID, and that the total number of domain IDs in a fabric is limited. In some cases, this limit can be fairly ...