IBM and Emulex have announced the IBM BladeCenter Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter recently and I promised I’d start picking apart the features every week so that you can get an idea of what this adapter and the total BladeCenter Virtual Fabric solution can do.
I wanted to start at the easy side, and work my way into the more complex features. So the easiest side of this is that at it’s core, the eVFA (my short name for this) is the base function of the adapter. At it’s core, this adapter is a two port 10Gb Ethernet adapter with full offload functionality. So let’s take a look at that function first.
As we’ve previously announced back in May, Emulex chose to partner with ServerEngines to deliver converged networking solutions. This is the first adapter to come out of that partnerships. The ASIC used is Emulex’s ‘Tigershark’.
The core features of this NIC is that it is a PCI Gen2 interface, and a dual port 10Gb ethernet out of the ASIC. The adapter also has the NCSI support for WoL an SoL so you can provide full services via this adapter for those protocols as well. Some key things to keep in mind is that this is a PCI Gen2 device and to get the full bandwidth out of it you do need a PCI Gen2 aware blade. Currently that is IBM’s BladeCenter HS22. At launch this will be the only server supported however since Gen2 is backwards compatible with Gen1 in theory it would work, albeit not at full performance capability due to the bandwidth limitations of the Gen1 slot in older blades.
As a standard NIC the eVFA adapter has full TOE offload. This is mostly exploited using the Windows Chimney Stack AKA The MS Windows 2003 Scalable Networking Pack or a default feature of Windows 2008. These allow the adapter to do most of the heavy lifting of packetizing and de-packetizing the data. The end result is lower CPU utilization & PCI Bus traffic for network traffic. This is especially helpful for heavy network traffic solutions. Details of how it’s enabled on Windows 2003/2008 can be found here. It is enabled by default on Windows 2008 Server R2. If you’re using Linux it’s currently not a supported option. We have no plans to bring anything custom out for linux so as long as TOE is viewed as non-viable by the kernel developers we will not offer any support for it. Because of that, the idea of TOE enabled adapters is not that exciting for linux servers. VMware is schedule to bring Asynchronous support for 10Gb iSCSI offloads about the time the iSCSI software key will be available so we should line up nicely for that functionality.
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