Flex System CN4052S and CN4054S 10Gb VFA5.2 Adapters
The Flex System CN4054S 4-port and CN4052S 2-port 10Gb Virtual Fabric Adapters are part of the VFA5.2 family of System x and Flex System adapters.
This product guide provides essential presales information to understand the CN4054S and CN4052S adapters and their key features, specifications, and compatibility. This guide is intended for technical specialists, sales specialists, sales engineers, IT architects, and other IT professionals who want to learn more about the adapters and consider their use in a Flex System solution.
The Flex System CN4052S 2-port and CN4054S 4-port 10Gb Virtual Fabric Adapters are part of the VFA5.2 family of System x and Flex System adapters. The CN4052S can be divided into up to eight virtual NIC (vNIC) devices per port (for a total of 16 vNICs) and the CN4054S can be divided in to four vNICs (for a total of 16 vNICs). Each vNIC can have flexible bandwidth allocation. These adapters also feature RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) capability, and support iSCSI, and FCoE protocols, either as standard or with the addition of a Features on Demand (FoD) license upgrade.
Features
The CN4054S 4-port 10Gb Virtual Fabric Adapter and CN4052S 2-port 10Gb Virtual Fabric Adapter, which are part of the VFA5.2 family of System x and Flex System adapters, reduce cost by enabling a converged infrastructure and improve performance with powerful offload engines. The adapters have the following features and benefits:
- Multiprotocol support for 10 GbE
The adapters offer two (CN4052S) or four (CN4054S) 10 GbE connections and are cost- and performance-optimized for integrated and converged infrastructures. They offer a “triple play” of converged data, storage, and low latency RDMA networking on a common Ethernet fabric. The adapters provides customers with a flexible storage protocol option for running heterogeneous workloads on their increasingly converged infrastructures.
- Virtual NIC emulation
The Emulex VFA5.2 family supports three NIC virtualization modes as standard: Virtual Fabric mode (vNIC1), switch independent mode (vNIC2), and Unified Fabric Port (UFP). With NIC virtualization, each of the physical ports on the adapter can be logically configured to emulate up to four or eight virtual NIC (vNIC) functions with user-definable bandwidth settings. With UFP or vNIC2, the CN4052S supports eight vNICs per port. Both adapters support four vNICs per port with vNIC1 and vNIC2. Additionally, each physical port can simultaneously support a storage protocol (FCoE or iSCSI).
- Full hardware storage offloads
These adapters support an FCoE hardware offload engine, which is either standard with the adapter or optionally enabled via Lenovo Features on Demand (FoD), depending on the adapter selected. The offload engine accelerates storage protocol processing and delivers up to 1.5 million I/O operations per second (IOPS). This enables the server’s processing resources to focus on applications and improves the server’s overall performance.
- Lenovo Features on Demand (FoD)
Adapters 00AG540 and 00AG590 use FoD software activation technology to enable additional features. FoD enables the adapters to be initially deployed as low-cost Ethernet NICs, and later upgraded in the field to support FCoE or iSCSI hardware offload. Adapters 00AG540 and 00AG590 use FoD to enable FCoE and iSCSI, whereas adapters 01CV780 and 01CV790 already have these features enabled and do not use Features on Demand.
- Emulex Virtual Network Acceleration (VNeX) technology support
Emulex VNeX supports Microsoft network virtualization by using generic routing encapsulation (NVGRE) and VMware-supported 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 processor, the adapters have an offload engine that is designed specifically for processing these tags. The resulting benefit is that cloud providers can use the benefits of VxLAN/NVGRE with no reduction in the server’s performance.
- Advanced RDMA capabilities with RoCE v2
The XE100-P2 controllers support the new InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) RDMA over Converged Ethernet v2 (RoCE v2) specification for Layer 3 routing. RoCE v2 delivers application and storage acceleration through faster I/O operations and support for Windows Server SMB Direct and Linux NFS protocols.
The XE100-P2 controllers 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.
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 per 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
- Lenovo XClarity support
The Emulex VFA5.2 family offers 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
- Deploy faster and manage less when multiple Emulex Virtual Fabric adapters (VFAs) and Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) are combined
VFAs and HBAs that are developed by Emulex use the same installation and configuration process, which streamlines the effort to get your server running and saves you valuable time. They also use the same Fibre Channel drivers, which reduces the time needed to qualify and manage storage connectivity. With Emulex's OneCommand Manager, you can manage multiple Emulex VFAs and HBAs from a single console.