NPIV is a Fibre Channel facility that enables one FC adapter to have many N_Port IDs. Each N_Port has a unique identity (port WWN and node WWN) on the SAN, and can be used for zoning and LUN masking. Soft zoning can be used to group ports together by port WWN. It is the preferred method of zoning.
This section provides the steps used to configure N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) ports, also known as virtual FC ports.