Introduction; Hardware Requirements; Software Requirements - Chelsio T5 Installation And User Manual

Chapter IV. NDIS SR-IOV

1. 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 T5 and T4 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.
1.1.

Hardware Requirements

1.1.1. Supported Adapters
The following are the currently shipping Chelsio Adapters that are compatible with the Chelsio
NDIS SR-IOV driver:
T520-BT
T502-BT
T520-CR
T580-CR
T580-LP-CR
T580-SO-CR
T520-LL-CR
T520-SO-CR
T540-CR
T522-CR
1.2.

Software Requirements

1.2.1. Linux Requirements
Currently, the NDIS SR-IOV driver is available for the following versions:
Windows Server Technical Preview 3
Windows Server 2012 R2
Other versions have not been tested and are not guaranteed to work.
Chelsio T5/T4 Unified Wire for Windows 74