The Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter II (CFFh) for IBM BladeCenter provides 10Gb/s Ethernet (10GbE) connectivity with the benefits and flexibility of both virtual NIC and I/O convergence with iSCSI or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). The Virtual Fabric Adapter II has two physical Ethernet ports that support 1Gb/s and 10Gb/s traffic. Each physical 10Gb/s port can be divided into four virtual ports with bandwidth allocation in 100Mb/s increments to the maximum 10Gb/s per physical port. The Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter II (90Y3550) is a network interface card (NIC) and the Virtual Fabric Adapter Advanced II (90Y3566) adds support for hardware offload of storage protocols. An upgrade option (49Y4265) can be used to add storage protocol support to the Virtual Fabric Adapter NIC, providing a future-proofed solution.

One Adapter to Manage All Workloads 1GbE, 10GbE, Virtual NIC, IO Convergence

The 10GbE Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter II for IBM BladeCenter is based on the Emulex third-generation BladeEngine 3 controller and is part of the OneConnect™ Universal Converged Network Adapter (UCNA) platform that supports hardware offload and acceleration for network and storage protocols. By using a common infrastructure for Ethernet and storage networks, data centers can reduce capital expense (CapEx) for adapters, switches and cables, and operating expense (OpEx) for power, cooling and IT administration.

Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter virtual NIC (vNIC) functions include:

• Each vNIC appears as an individual adapter to the operating system.
• Each vNIC can allocate bandwidth at increments of 100Mb.
• The adapter can connect to either 1Gb or 10Gb data center infrastructure.