The Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter 5 Generation 2 (VFA5.2) Network Adapter Family for system x builds on the foundation of the previous generation of Emulex VFA5 adapters by delivering performance enhancements, including RoCE v2 support and management enhancements with improved support for Lenovo XClarity. These features help reduce complexity, reduce cost, and improve performance with Lenovo servers.
Virtual NIC emulation
The Emulex VFA5.2 supports three NIC virtualization modes right out of the box: Virtual Fabric mode (vNIC1), switch independent mode (vNIC2), and Unified 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 use both Virtual Fabric Adapters (VFAs) and Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) that are developed by Emulex. VFAs and HBAs developed by Emulex use the same installation and configuration process, streamlining the effort to get your server configured and running, saving you valuable time. They also use the same Fiber Channel drivers, reducing time to qualify and manage storage connectivity. With Emulex's OneCommand Manager, you can manage VFAs and HBAs that are developed by Emulex through the data center from a single console.
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 VFA5.2 has an offload engine specifically designed for processing these tags. The resulting benefit is that cloud providers can leverage the benefits of VXLAN/NVGRE with no reduction in the server's performance.
