User`s guide

Chapter III. Virtual Function Network (vNIC)

1. Introduction

The ever increasing network infrastructure of IT enterprises has lead to a phenomenal increase

in maintenance and operational costs. IT managers are forced to acquire more physical servers

and other data center resources to satisfy storage and network demands. To solve the Network

and I/O overhead, users are opting for server virtualization which consolidates I/O workloads

onto lesser physical servers thus resulting in efficient, dynamic and economical data center

environments. Other benefits of Virtualization include improved disaster recovery, server

portability, cloud computing, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), etc.

  Unified Wire family of Adapters deliver increased bandwidth, lower latency and

lower power with virtualization features to maximize cloud scaling and utilization. The adapters

support SFP+ and 10BASE-T media. The adapters also provide full support for PCI-SIG SR-

IOV to improve I/O performance on a virtualized system. User can configure up to 128 Virtual

and 8 Physical functions (with 4 PFs as SR-IOV capable) along with 336 virtual MAC

addresses.

1.1. Hardware Requirements

1.1.1. Supported Adapters

The following are the currently shipping Chelsio Adapters that are compatible with the Chelsio

vNIC driver:

T420-CR

T420-LL-CR

T440-CR

T440-LP-CR

T422-CR

T420-SO-CR

T420-CX

T420-BT

T404-BT

1.2. Software Requirements

1.2.1. Linux Requirements

Currently the vNIC driver is available for the following versions:

Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 update 3 kernel (RHEL5.3), 2.6.18-128.el5 *

Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 update 4 kernel (RHEL5.4), 2.6.18-164.el5

Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 update 5 kernel (RHEL5.5), 2.6.18-194.el5