Modes Of Operation - IBM Emulex 10GbE Virtual Fabric Adapter II for System x At-A-Glance Manual

PCI Express 2.0 x8 host interface
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Low-profile form-factor design
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IPv4/IPv6 TCP, UDP checksum offload
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VLAN insertion and extraction
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Support for jumbo frames up to 9000 bytes
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Preboot eXecutive Environment (PXE) 2.0 network boot support
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Interrupt coalescing
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Load balancing and failover support
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Based on Emulex OneConnect technology and including FCoE and iSCSI support as a feature
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entitlement upgrade (iSCSI storage target support is planned in 1Q 2012)
Simplifies I/O hardware choices for IT managers
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Maximizes I/O consolidation with high-performance 10GbE ports
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One network infrastructure reduces CapEx
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One management console reduces OpEx
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Leverages existing IT investments
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Deploy and manage this and other Emulex OneConnect-based adapters with OneCommand
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Manager
Features enabled by Emulex VFA II FCoE License are:
Optimized network and storage connectivity with high-performance FCoE offload and iSCSI offload
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(iSCSI storage target support is planned in 1Q 2012)
Leverages 10 generations of advanced, field-proven Fibre Channel technology
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One infrastructure for network and storage reduces CapEx
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Industry-leading performance per watt reduces OpEx
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Protocol offloads support Emulex VEngine™ technology to enable more virtual machines per server
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Modes of operation

The Emulex 10GbE Virtual Fabric Adapter II and Emulex 10GbE Integrated Virtual Fabric Adapter II offer
two vNIC modes of operation in addition to pNIC mode:
IBM Virtual Fabric Mode is the same as vNIC mode on original Emulex 10GbE Virtual Fabric
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Adapters. This mode only works in conjunction with IBM BNT rack switches G8124 and G8264. In this
mode, the Emulex adapter communicates with the switch module to obtain vNIC parameters (using
DCBX). A special tag is added within each data packet and is later removed by the NIC and switch
for each vNIC group to maintain separation of the virtual channels.
In vNIC mode, each physical port is divided into four virtual ports providing a total of eight virtual NICs
per adapter. The default bandwidth for each vNIC is 2.5 Gbps. Bandwidth for each vNIC can be
configured at the BNT switch from 100 Mbps to 10 Gbps, up to a total of 10 Gb per physical port. The
vNICs can also be configured to have 0 bandwidth if you must allocate the available bandwidth to
fewer than eight vNICs. In IBM Virtual Fabric Mode, you can change the bandwidth allocations
through the BNT switch user interfaces without requiring a reboot of the server.
When storage protocols are enabled on the Emulex 10GbE Virtual Fabric Adapter II, six ports are
Ethernet, and two ports are either iSCSI or FCoE.
Emulex 10GbE Virtual Fabric Adapter II for IBM System x 4