As part of my studies I noticed the following in the documentation for vSphere 5.5 Platform Features: –

16GB E2E Support

In vSphere 5.0, VMware introduced support for 16Gb FC HBAs. However these HBAs were throttled down to work at 8Gb. In vSphere 5.1, VMware introduced support to run these HBAs at 16Gb. However, there is no support for full, end-to-end 16Gb connectivity from host to array. To get full bandwidth, a number of 8Gb connections must be created from the switch to the storage array.

In vSphere 5.5, VMware introduces 16Gb end-to-end FC support. Both the HBAs and array controllers can run at 16Gb as long as the FC switch between the initiator and target supports it.

So, if you want to take advantage of 16GB FC on vSphere, make sure you are running the latest version of vSphere 5.5 – that is all.