Last week I had received some great news from our friends over at ATTO Technology that their ESXi Thunderbolt to Fibre Channel Driver has passed the VMware Certification process and is now officially listed on VMware's HCL. I had known the team was planning to certify their driver but was not aware of their timelines and whether it would actually get accepted given the fact that this was for a Thunderbolt-based device, which is the first of its kind for the VMware HCL.
Funny enough, it was roughly around this time last year that ATTO released a Beta of their ESXi Thunderbolt to Fibre Channel Driver which I had shared with my readers here. I was not surprised by the demand given the fact that no official solutions exists for customers who would like to take advantage of their existing SAN-based storage infrastructure when virtualizing Apple macOS (iOS development, etc) on vSphere. ATTO has certified two of their ThunderLink devices, customers have the option of using either the TLFC2082 which provides 20Gb/s Thunderbolt 2 (2-port) to 8Gb/s FC (2-Port) Device or the TLFC2182 which provides 20Gb/s Thunderbolt 2 (2-port) to 16Gb/s FC (2-Port) Device which is supported from ESXi 5.5u3 all the way up to latest 6.5u1 release.
Click here for the direct link to VMware HCL.
Huge congrats to the ATTO team for getting this on the VMware HCL and partnering up with VMware to provide a solution for our customers who virtualize Apple macOS using vSphere!
Lastly, if you are going to be at VMworld and you are interested in learning more about this solution, be sure to drop by the ATTO booth.
Jack H says
02/24/2018 at 1:39 pmAny Thunderbolt 3 storage hardware that works here? Would love to hook up a 4-bay RAID box via Thunderbolt 3 to my Intel NUC Skull Canyon running Vmware ESXI 6.5U1…