Flex System CN4054 and CN4054R 10Gb Virtual Fabric Adapters
The Flex System™ CN4054 and CN4054R 10Gb Virtual Fabric Adapters are 4-port 10Gb converged network adapters (CNAs) that support Ethernet, iSCSI, and FCoE. The adapters support up to 16 virtual NIC (vNIC) devices, where each physical 10 GbE port can be divided into four virtual ports with flexible bandwidth allocation. The CN4054 Virtual Fabric Adapter Upgrade adds FCoE and iSCSI hardware initiator functionality to either adapter. The CN4054R adds support for compute nodes with the Intel Xeon E5-2600 v2 and v3 processors.
The adapters have these features:
- Four-port 10 Gb Ethernet adapter
- Two ASICs per adapter:
- CN4054: Dual-ASIC Emulex BladeEngine 3 (BE3) controller
- CN4054R: Dual-ASIC Emulex BladeEngine 3R (BE3R) controller
- Connection to either 1 Gb or 10 Gb data center infrastructure (1 Gb and 10 Gb auto-negotiation)
- PCI Express 3.0 x8 host interface
- Operates either as a 4-port 1/10 Gb Ethernet adapter or supports up to 16 vNICs.
- Supports Unified Fabric Port (UFP)
- In virtual NIC (vNIC) mode, each adapter supports:
- Virtual port bandwidth allocation in 100 Mbps increments.
- Up to 16 virtual ports per adapter (four per port).
- With the CN4054 Virtual Fabric Adapter Upgrade, 90Y3558, four of the 16 vNICs (one per port) support iSCSI or FCoE.
- Supports for two vNIC modes: Virtual Fabric Mode and Switch Independent Mode
- Wake On LAN support.
- With the CN4054 Virtual Fabric Adapter Upgrade, 90Y3558, the adapter adds FCoE and iSCSI hardware initiator support.
- iSCSI support is implemented as a full offload and presents an iSCSI adapter to the operating system.
- TCP Offload Engine (TOE) support with Windows Server and Linux.
- Connection and its state are passed to the TCP offload engine.
- Data transmit and receive is handled by adapter.
- Supported with iSCSI.
- Full-duplex (FDX) capability
- Bus-mastering support
- Direct memory access (DMA) support
- Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) support
- IPv4/IPv6 TCP, UDP checksum offload
- Large send offload (LSO)
- Large receive offload
- Receive side scaling (RSS)
- IPv4 TCP Chimney Offload
- TCP Segmentation Offload
- VLAN insertion and extraction
- Jumbo frames up to 9000 bytes
- Load balancing and failover support, including adapter fault tolerance (AFT), switch fault tolerance (SFT), adaptive load balancing (ALB), teaming support, and IEEE 802.3ad
- Enhanced Ethernet (draft)
- Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS) (P802.1Qaz)
- Priority-based Flow Control (PFC) (P802.1Qbb)
- Data Center Bridging Capabilities eXchange Protocol, CIN-DCBX and CEE-DCBX (P802.1Qaz)
- Supports Serial over LAN (SoL)
- Total Max Power: 23.1 W
Modes of operation
The CN4054 and CN4054R 10Gb Virtual Fabric Adapters support three vNIC modes of operation in addition to pNIC mode:
- Virtual Fabric Mode. This mode only works in conjunction with any of the following switches installed in the chassis:
- Flex System Fabric CN4093 10Gb Converged Scalable Switch
- Flex System Fabric EN4093R 10Gb Scalable Switch
- Flex System Fabric EN4093 10Gb Scalable Switch
In this mode, the adapter communicates with the switch module to obtain vNIC parameters (using DCBX). Also, a special tag within each data packet is added and later removed by the NIC and switch for each vNIC group to maintain separation of the virtual channels.
In vNIC mode, each physical port is divided into four virtual ports, providing a total of 16 virtual NICs per adapter. The default bandwidth for each vNIC is 2.5 Gbps. Bandwidth for each vNIC can be configured at the switch from 100 Mbps to 10 Gbps, up to a total of 10 Gb per physical port. The vNICs can also be configured to have 0 bandwidth if you must allocate the available bandwidth to fewer than eight vNICs. In Virtual Fabric Mode, you can change the bandwidth allocations through the switch user interfaces without requiring a reboot of the server.
When storage protocols are enabled on the adapter (using CN4054 Virtual Fabric Adapter Upgrade, 90Y3558), six ports are Ethernet, and two ports are either iSCSI or FCoE
- Switch Independent Mode, where the adapter works with the following switches:
- Cisco Nexus B22 Fabric Extender for Flex System
- Flex System EN4023 10Gb Scalable Switch
- Flex System Fabric CN4093 10Gb Converged Scalable Switch
- Flex System Fabric EN4093R 10Gb Scalable Switch
- Flex System Fabric EN4093 10Gb Scalable Switch
- Flex System Fabric SI4093 System Interconnect Module
- Flex System EN4091 10Gb Ethernet Pass-thru and a top-of-rack (TOR) switch
Switch Independent Mode offers the same capabilities as Virtual Fabric Mode in terms of the number of vNICs and the bandwidth that each can be configured to have. However, Switch Independent Mode extends the existing customer VLANs to the virtual NIC interfaces. The IEEE 802.1Q VLAN tag is essential to the separation of the vNIC groups by the NIC adapter or driver and the switch. The VLAN tags are added to the packet by the applications or drivers at each end station rather than by the switch.
- Unified Fabric Port (UFP) provides a feature rich solution compared to the original vNIC Virtual Fabric mode. Like Virtual Fabric mode vNIC, UFP allows carving up a single 10 Gb port into four virtual NICs (called vPorts in UFP). UFP also has a number of modes associated with it, including:
- Tunnel mode: Provides Q-in-Q mode, where the vPort is customer VLAN-independent (very similar to vNIC Virtual Fabric Dedicated Uplink Mode)
- Trunk mode: Provides a traditional 802.1Q trunk mode (multi-VLAN trunk link) to the virtual NIC (vPort) interface, i.e. permits host side tagging
- Access mode: Provides a traditional access mode (single untagged VLAN) to the virtual NIC (vPort) interface which is similar to a physical port in access mode
- FCoE mode: Provides FCoE functionality to the vPort
- Auto-VLAN mode: Auto VLAN creation for Qbg and VMready environments
Only one vPort (vPort 2) per physical port can be bound to FCoE. If FCoE is not desired, vPort 2 can be configured for one of the other modes.
- In pNIC mode, the expansion card can operate as a standard 10 Gbps or 1 Gbps 4-port Ethernet expansion card. When in pNIC mode, the expansion card functions with all supported I/O modules.
In pNIC mode, the adapter with the CN4054 Virtual Fabric Adapter Upgrade, 90Y3558, applied operates in traditional Converged Network Adapter (CNA) mode with four ports of Ethernet and four ports of storage (iSCSI or FCoE) available to the operating system.