Chelsio Communications, a provider of 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) adapters and ASIC solutions, has 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 virtualised environments. This is an important step toward Chelsio's goal to enable unified wire networking for the data centre 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 virtualisation platform for a robust network and I/O requirements of a virtualised infrastructure."

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

Chelsio's adapters are powered by T3 ASIC technology, designed for virtualisation at the silicon level and enable line-rate performance for transmit and receive. Chelsio's T3 architecture delivers a high volume of transactions per second. In addition to VMware virtualisation support, Chelsio's T3 technology provides support for RDMA, iSCSI, TOE, Traffic Management and packet classification.