A physical connection on the host adapter that resides within a host. When the host adapter only has one physical connection (initiator port), the terms initiator port and host adapter are synonymous.
The initiator ports are automatically detected by the storage management software after the host type recognizes the initiator port. An initiator port is the actual physical connection that allows a host to gain access to the logical drives in the storage subsystem. If you want to define specific logical drive-to-logical unit number (LUN) mappings for a particular host and create storage partitions, you must define its associated initiator ports.