Emulex VFA5 Adapter Family for IBM System x
4
Features
The VFA5 adapters offer virtualized networking, support a converged infrastructure, and improve
performance with powerful offload engines. The adapter has the following features and benefits.
Reduce complexity
Virtual NIC emulation
The Emulex VFA5 supports three NIC virtualization modes, right out of the box: IBM Virtual Fabric
mode (vNIC1), switch independent mode (vNIC2), and Universal Fabric Port (UFP). With NIC
virtualization, each of the two physical ports on the adapter can be logically configured to emulate up
to four virtual NIC (vNIC) functions with user-definable bandwidth settings. Additionally, each physical
port can simultaneously support a storage protocol (FCoE or iSCSI).
Common drivers and tools
You can deploy faster and manage less when you implement both Virtual Fabric Adapters (VFAs) and
Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) that are developed by Emulex. IBM VFAs and HBAs that are developed by
Emulex use the same installation and configuration process, streamlining the effort to get your server
running, and saving you valuable time. They also use the same Fibre Channel drivers, reducing time
to qualify and manage storage connectivity. With Emulex's OneCommand Manager, you can manage
IBM VFAs and HBAs that are developed by Emulex through the data center from a single console.
Reduce cost
Multi-protocol support for 10 GbE
The Emulex VFA5 offers two 10 Gb Ethernet ports and is cost- and performance-optimized for
integrated and converged infrastructures. The VFA5 offers a “triple play” of converged data, storage,
and low latency RDMA (RDMA support is planned for 1H/2015) networking on a common Ethernet
fabric. The Emulex VFA provides customers with a flexible storage protocol option for running
heterogeneous workloads on their increasingly converged infrastructures.
Power savings
When compared with previous generation Emulex VFA3 adapters, the Emulex VFA5 you can save up
to 50 watts per server, reducing energy and cooling OPEX through improved storage offloads.
Delay purchasing features until you need them with IBM Features on Demand (FoD)
The VFA5 adapters use IBM Features on Demand (FoD) software activation technology. FoD enables
the adapter to be initially deployed as a low-cost Ethernet NIC, and then later upgraded in the field to
support FCoE or iSCSI hardware offload.
Improve performance
VXLAN/NVGRE offload technology
Emulex supports Microsoft’s network virtualization using generic routing encapsulation (NVGRE) and
VMware’s virtual extensible LAN (VXLAN). These technologies create more logical LANs (for traffic
isolation) that are needed by cloud architectures. Because these protocols increase the processing
burden on the server’s CPU, the VFA5 has an offload engine specifically designed for processing
these tags. The resulting benefit is that cloud providers can leverage the benefits of VXLAN/NVGRE
while not being penalized with a reduction in the server’s performance.
Full hardware storage offloads
The Emulex VFA5 supports a hardware offload engine (optionally enabled via a Features on Demand
upgrade, standard on 00JY830) that accelerates storage protocol processing, which enables the
server’s processing resources to focus on applications, improving the server’s performance.
