Introduction; Hardware Requirements - Chelsio Communications Terminator Series Installation And User Manual

Chapter III. Virtual Function Network (vNIC)

Introduction

The ever-increasing network infrastructure of IT enterprises has lead to a phenomenal increase
in maintenance and operational costs. IT managers are forced to acquire more physical servers
and other data center resources to satisfy storage and network demands. To solve the Network
and I/O overhead, users are opting for server virtualization which consolidates I/O workloads onto
lesser physical servers thus resulting in efficient, dynamic and economical data center
environments. Other benefits of Virtualization include improved disaster recovery, server
portability, cloud computing, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), etc.
Chelsio's Unified Wire family of adapters deliver increased bandwidth, lower latency and lower
power with virtualization features to maximize cloud scaling and utilization. The adapters also
provide full support for PCI-SIG SR-IOV to improve I/O performance on a virtualized system. User
can configure up to 64 Virtual and 8 Physical functions (with 4 PFs as SR-IOV capable) along
with 336 virtual MAC addresses.
1.1.

Hardware Requirements

Supported adapters
The following are the currently shipping Chelsio adapters that are compatible with the Chelsio
vNIC driver:
T62100-CR
T62100-LP-CR
T62100-SO-CR
T6425-CR
T6225-CR
T6225-LL-CR
T6225-OCP
T6225-SO-CR
T580-CR
T580-LP-CR
T540-CR
T540-BT
T520-CR
T520-LL-CR
T520-BT
T420-CR
T440-CR
T422-CR
T420-SO-CR
T404-BT
T440-LP-CR
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