The Emulex 10GbE Virtual Fabric Adapter II (CFFh) for IBM BladeCenter provides 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) connectivity with the benefits and flexibility of both virtual Network Interface Card (vNIC) 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 10GbE Virtual Fabric Adapter II 00Y3266 (90Y3550) is a NIC and the Emulex 10GbE Virtual Fabric Adapter Advanced II 00Y3264 (90Y3566) includes support for hardware offload of storage protocols. ​ An upgrade option (49Y4265) can be used to add storage protocol support to the Emulex 10GbE Virtual Fabric Adapter II for IBM BladeCenter, providing a future-proofed solution.

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

The Emulex 10GbE Virtual Fabric Adapter II for IBM BladeCenter is based on the Emulex third-generation BladeEngine™ 3 controller and 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 expenditures (CAPEX) for adapters, switches and cables, and operating expenditures (OPEX) for power, cooling and IT administration.

Emulex Virtual Fabric Adapter 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 a 1Gb or 10Gb data center infrastructure.