How do we enable NPIV mode on physical Fibre Channel HBAs

Hello Lea Weber,

The failure to discover SAN targets with Virtual Fibre Channel in Hyper‑V, combined with NPIV login rejections on the physical FC switch, indicates that the outer switch ports are not configured to allow NPIV (N_Port ID Virtualization) logins. Nested or guest VMs using Virtual FC rely on NPIV to present multiple virtual WWNs through the same physical HBA port. If the switch port is set to “single initiator” mode or NPIV is disabled, the logins from the guest VMs will be rejected.

You need to verify on the FC switch that NPIV is enabled on the physical port connected to the Hyper‑V host’s HBA. On Cisco MDS or Brocade, this is typically done by setting the port mode to allow multiple N_Port logins and confirming that the WWNs assigned to the guest VM adapters are zoned correctly to the storage targets. On the Hyper‑V side, ensure that the virtual FC adapters are configured with static WWNs and that those WWNs are registered in the SAN zoning. Without NPIV enabled and proper zoning, the guest VM will never be able to log in to the SAN.

Once NPIV is enabled and the WWNs are zoned, the SAN discovery will succeed and the error will clear.

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Thank you,

HL.