The Cisco UCS M81KR is designed for both traditional operating system and virtualization environments. It
is optimized for virtualized environments, for organizations that seek increased mobility in their physical
environments, and for data centers that want reduced TCO through NIC, HBA, cabling, and switch reduction.
The Cisco UCS M81KR presents up to 128 virtual interfaces to the operating system on a given blade. The
128 virtual interfaces can be dynamically configured by Cisco UCS Manager as either Fibre Channel or
Ethernet devices. Deployment of applications using multiple Ethernet and Fibre Channel interfaces is no
longer constrained by the available physical adapters. To an operating system or a hypervisor running on a
Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Server, the virtual interfaces appear as regular PCIe devices.
The Cisco UCS M81KR has built-in architectural support enabling the virtual machine to directly access the
adapter. I/O bottlenecks and memory performance can be improved by providing virtual machines direct
access to hardware I/O devices, eliminating the overhead of embedded software switches.
The Cisco UCS M81KR also brings adapter consolidation to physical environments. The adapter can be
defined as multiple different NICs and HBAs. For example, one adapter card can replace two quad-port NICs
and two single-port HBAs, resulting in fewer NICs, HBAs, switches, and cables.
Cisco UCS 82598KR-CI 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter
The Cisco UCS 82598KR-CI 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter is based on the Intel 82598 10 Gigabit Ethernet
controller, which is designed for efficient high-performance Ethernet transport. It provides a solution for data
center environments that need low-latency 10 Gigabit Ethernet transport capability, and a dual-port connection
to the midplane of the blade server chassis.
The Cisco UCS 82598KR-CI supports Intel Input/Output Acceleration Technology (I/OAT) as well as virtual
queues for I/O virtualization. The adapter is energy efficient and can also help reduce CPU utilization by
providing large segment offload (LSO) and TCP segmentation offload (TSO). The Cisco UCS 82598KR-CI
uses Intel Virtual Machine Device Queue (VMDq) technology for the efficient routing of packets to the
appropriate virtual machine.
Cisco UCS M71KR-E Emulex Converged Network Adapter
The Cisco UCS M71KR-E Emulex Converged Network Adapter (CNA) is an Emulex-based Fibre Channel
over Ethernet (FCoE) adapter card that provides connectivity for Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers in the
Cisco Unified Computing System.
Designed specifically for the Cisco UCS blades, the adapter provides a dual-port connection to the midplane
of the blade server chassis. The Cisco UCS M71KR-E uses an Intel 82598 10 Gigabit Ethernet controller for
network traffic and an Emulex 4-Gbps Fibre Channel controller for Fibre Channel traffic all on the same
adapter card. The Cisco UCS M71KR-E presents two discrete Fibre Channel host bus adapter (HBA) ports
and two Ethernet network ports to the operating system.
The Cisco UCS M71KR-E provides both 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 4-Gbps Fibre Channel functions using
drivers from Emulex, providing:
•
Compatibility with current Emulex adapter-based SAN environments and drivers
•
Consolidation of LAN and SAN traffic over the same adapter card and fabric, reducing the overall
number of network interface cards (NICs), HBAs, cables, and switches
•
Integrated management with Cisco UCS Manager
Cisco UCS 5108 Server Chassis Installation Guide
21
Overview
Adapter Cards
