Introduction
Rev 1.6
9
Mellanox Technologies
1
Introduction
This is the User Guide for Mellanox Technologies VPI adapter cards based on the ConnectX®-5
integrated circuit device. Mellanox offers an alternate ConnectX-5 Socket Direct™ card for serv-
ers without x16 PCIe slots. The adapter’s 16-lane PCIe bus is split into two 8-lane buses, with
one bus accessible through a PCIe x8 edge connector and the other bus through an x8 parallel
connector to an Auxiliary PCIe Connection Card. The two cards should be installed into two
adjacent PCIe x8 slots and connected using a dedicated harness.
Figure 1: ConnectX-5 VPI Socket Direct Card
Since the two PCIe cards are installed in two PCIe slots, each card gets a unique PCI Bus and
Device number. Each of the PCIe x8 busses sees two network ports; in effect, the two 100Gb/s
physical ports of the ConnectX-5 Socket Direct Adapter are viewed as four netdevices by the
system, with each netdevice providing a maximum of 50Gb/s data transfer rate. In other words,
100Gb/s on a (physical) adapter port (Port 1 or Port 2) will be split on the PCIe side to 50Gb/s on
each of the two PCIe cards (the Adapter Card and the Auxiliary PCIe Connection Cards, respec-
tively, in
This chapter covers the following topics:
• Section 1.1, “Product Overview”, on page 10
• Section 1.3, “Features and Benefits”, on page 12
• Section 1.4, “Operating Systems/Distributions”, on page 14
• Section 1.5, “Connectivity”, on page 14
• Section 1.6, “Manageability”, on page 14
Adapter Card
Auxiliary PCIe
Slim Line SAS Harness
Connection Card
