Emulex VFA5 Adapter Family for IBM System x
5
Advanced RDMA capabilities (planned for 1H/2015)
RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) delivers application and storage acceleration through faster
I/O operations with support for Windows Server SMB Direct and Linux NFS protocols. With RoCE, the
VFA5 adapter helps accelerate workloads in the following ways:
Capability to deliver a 4x boost in small packet network performance vs. previous generation
adapters, which is critical for transaction-heavy workloads
Desktop-like experiences for VDI with up to 1.5 million FCoE or iSCSI I/O operations per second
(IOPS)
Ability to scale Microsoft SQL Server, Exchange, and SharePoint using SMB Direct optimized
with RoCE
More VDI desktops/server due to up to 18% higher CPU effectiveness (the percentage of server
CPU utilization for every 1 Mbps I/O throughput)
Superior application performance for VMware hybrid cloud workloads due to up to 129% higher
I/O throughput compared to adapters without offload
Specifications
Adapter specifications:
Dual-channel 10 Gbps Ethernet controller
Based on the Emulex XE102 ASIC
PCI Express 3.0 x8 host interface
Line-rate 10 GbE performance
Upgradeable to support converged networking (FCoE and iSCSI) through IBM Features on Demand
2 SFP+ empty cages to support either SFP+ SR or twin-ax copper connections
SFP+ SR link is with the SFP+ SR optical module with LC connectors.
o
SFP+ twin-ax copper link is with the SFP+ direct attached copper module/cable.
o
Power dissipation: 14.4 W typical
Form factor:
Mezzanine LOM (ML2) form factor (adapter 00D1996)
PCIe low-profile form factor (adapters 00JY820, 00JY830, and feature code AS3M)
Virtualization features
Virtual Fabric support:
IBM Virtual Fabric mode (vNIC1)
Switch Independent mode (vNIC2)
Universal Fabric Port (UFP) support
Four NIC partitions per adapter port
Complies with PCI-SIG specification for SR-IOV
VXLAN/NVGRE encapsulation and offload
PCI-SIG Address Translation Service (ATS) v1.0
Virtual Switch Port Mirroring for Diagnostic purposes
Virtual Ethernet Bridge (VEB)
62 Virtual functions (VF)
QoS for controlling and monitoring bandwidth that is assigned to and used by virtual entities
Traffic shaping and QoS across each virtual function (VF) and physical function (PF)
Message Signal Interrupts (MSI-X) support
VMware NetQue / VMQ support
Microsoft VMQ & Dynamic VMQ support in Hyper-V
