Chelsio Communications announced that its single- and dual-port 10GbE adapters are now certified for the VMware ESX hypervisor and have been added to the VMware ESX 3.5 Hardware Compatibility List. With this certification, Chelsio offers VMware customers low-latency adapters for high-performance computing in virtualized environments. This is another important step toward Chelsio's goal to enable unified wire networking for the agile data center by providing simple, standards-based solutions.

"We believe Chelsio's 10Gb network adapters can offer VMware users significant advances in I/O performance benefits and bandwidth improvements," said Brian Byun, vice president of global partners and solutions at VMware. "Chelsio's technology complements the VMware virtualization platform for the more robust network and I/O requirements of a virtualized infrastructure."

"The VMware platform is an optimal choice for helping customers address the space, power, cooling and management issues in their data centers, making support for virtualization a key component of Chelsio's T3 technology," said Kianoosh Naghshineh, president and CEO of Chelsio Communications. "VMware and Chelsio are a powerful combination that enables end-users to achieve high throughput within their virtualized environments and opens the way for new network-intensive applications

Chelsio's adapters are powered by T3 ASIC technology, designed for virtualization at the silicon level and enabling line-rate performance for transmit and receive. Chelsio's cut-through T3 architecture delivers a high volume of transactions per second. Chelsio's customers are able to use the same drivers for any host bus, any physical media, any offload protocol, and any number of ports and speeds of Ethernet. In addition to VMware virtualization support, Chelsio's T3 technology provides support for RDMA, iSCSI, TOE, Traffic Management and packet classification. This enables Chelsio's customers to future-proof their systems.

The adapters for VMware ESX are available today from Chelsio and its distribution partners. The Chelsio driver for VMware ESX is also available for download from VMware.