Lenovo Vfa5.2 Ml2 2X10Gbe W/Fcoe - 01CV770

The VFA5.2 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 VFA5.2 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 Fibre 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.

• Improved support for Lenovo XClarity
  • Supports agent-free management, eliminating platform agents to reduce complexity
  • Supports automatic inventory management to simplify management
  • Supports real-time monitoring, fault detection and alert handling for a more secure managed environment
  • Supports automatic firmware downloads and installation for true bare metal provisioning

Reduce cost

• Multiprotocol support for 10 GbE

  The Emulex VFA5.2 adapter family offers two 10 Gb Ethernet ports and is cost- and performance-optimized for integrated and converged infrastructures. The VFA5.2 offers a “triple play” of converged data, storage, and low-latency RDMA 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. Note: the OCe14104B-NX 4-port adapter does not support FCoE and iSCSI storage protocols.

• Power savings

  When compared with previous generation Emulex VFA3 adapters, the Emulex VFA5.2 adapters can save up to 50 watts per server, reducing energy and cooling OPEX through improved storage offloads.

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 VFA5.2 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.

• Full hardware storage offloads

  The Emulex VFA5.2 adapters support a hardware offload engine (optionally enabled via Features on Demand upgrade, standard on 00AG580 and 01CV770). This accelerates storage protocol processing, which enables the server’s processing resources to focus on application workloads, thus improving the server’s performance. Note: the OCe14104B-NX 4-port adapter does not support FCoE and iSCSI storage protocols.

• Advanced RDMA capabilities with RoCE v2

  RDMA over Converged Ethernet v2 (RoCE v2) delivers application and storage acceleration through faster I/O operations with support for Windows Server SMB Direct and Linux NFS protocols.

  The VFA5.2 adapters leverage RoCE v2, enabling server-to-server data movement directly between application memory without any CPU involvement. This provides high throughput and data acceleration on a standard Ethernet fabric, without the need for specialized infrastructure or management.

  The adapters support the new InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) RoCE v2 specification for Layer 3 routing. RoCE also 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, with up to 129% higher I/O throughput compared to adapters without offload