Patent ID: 7516252

Claim:
A method comprising: initializing a plurality of ports on at least one physical host bus adapter, the plurality of ports including a first port and a second port, the initializing including assigning a first interrupt vector to the first port, the first interrupt vector including a first address value and a first data value; allocating the first port to a first operating system to create a first virtual host bus adapter in the first operating system, the first virtual host bus adapter including a port associated with the first port; allocating the second port to a second operating system to create a second virtual host bus adapter, the second virtual host bus adapter including a port associated with the second port; binding the first port of the plurality of ports to the port on the first virtual host bus adapter; and binding the second port of the plurality of ports to the port on the second virtual host bus adapter; a port controller and each operating system occupying a respective separate unique physical memory space and having a respective interrupt descriptor table in the respective physical memory space, the interrupt vectors being associated via the respective interrupt descriptor table of the port controller with entries in the respective interrupt descriptor tables of the operating systems, the entries being associated with the ports of the virtual host bus adapters.