Chapter 15. Virtual Nics - Lenovo Flex System Fabric CN4093 Application Manual

Chapter 15. Virtual NICs

© Copyright Lenovo 2017
A Network Interface Controller (NIC) is a component within a blade server that
allows the server to be connected to a network. The NIC provides the physical
point of connection, as well as internal software for encoding and decoding
network packets.
Virtualizing the NIC helps to resolve issues caused by limited NIC slot availability.
By virtualizing a 10Gbps NIC, its resources can be divided into multiple logical
instances known as virtual NICs (vNICs). Each vNIC appears as a regular,
independent NIC to the server operating system or a hypervisor, with each vNIC
using some portion of the physical NIC's overall bandwidth.
Figure 26. Virtualizing the NIC for Multiple Virtual Pipes on Each Link
Blade Server 1
OS or
Hypervisor
A CN4093 with Enterprise NOS 8.4 supports the Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter
(VFA) 2‐port 10Gb LOM and Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter (Fabric Mezz) for
Lenovo Flex System to provide the following vNIC features:
Up to four vNICs are supported on each internal switch port.

 Each vNIC can accommodate one of the following traffic types: regular
Ethernet, iSCSI or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).
 vNICs with traffic of the same type can be grouped together, along with regular
internal ports, external uplink ports and LAGs, to define vNIC groups for
enforcing communication boundaries.
 In the case of a failure on the external uplink ports associated with a vNIC
group, the switch can signal affected vNICs for failover while permitting other
vNICs to continue operation.
 Each vNIC can be allocated a symmetric percentage of the 10Gbps bandwidth
on the link (from NIC to switch, and from switch to NIC).
 The CN4093 can be used as the single point of vNIC configuration.
NIC
Physical
VNIC
NIC Ports Switch Ports
VNIC
VNIC
10 Gbps Link with
VNIC
Multiple Virtual Pipes
VNIC
VNIC
VNIC
VNIC
Internal
Lenovo
Switch 1
INTA1
Lenovo
Switch 2
INTA1
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