Ethernet I/O Virtualization
VIO-4004 10Gbps Ethernet I/O Virtualization ApplianceThe VIO-4004 consolidates and virtualizes network connectivity to a rack of servers and provides up to 80Gbps of converged Ethernet uplink bandwidth to the servers. The VIO-4004 also increases the performance of virtualized servers to unprecedented levels by providing VMs with the highest level of connectivity bandwidth and access to I/O line-rate while minimizing the CPU I/O processing overhead. It removes the physical Ethernet NICs from servers within a rack, leaving the servers as pure compute and memory engines. These I/O adapters are pooled and consolidated within the VIO-4004 which creates virtual images of the I/O adapters (vNICs) that are presented to each server. The vNICs emulate exactly the physical NICs and don’t require any changes to the server, OS, application or I/O device driver. The VIO-4004 enables multiple servers to simultaneously access and share the physical adaptors.
The VIO-4004 connects to up to 16 servers using a single PCI Express® (PCIe) cable per server that connects directly to the server-native PCIe bus and provides 20Gbps bandwidth per PCIe connection to each server. The PCIe cable replaces the multiple Ethernet cables per server. The VIO-4004 provides up to 4x 10GbE uplinks to servers and connects directly to the corporate networks without additional layer of Top-of-Rack Ethernet access switching. This reduces I/O capital equipment costs, I/O power consumption, server management complexity and operational expenses by more than 60% compared to traditional Ethernet deployments.The VIO-4004 enables servers to be wired once and then dynamically reconfigured with different Ethernet profiles without any physical reconfiguration. The VIO-4004 is a lossless and non-blocking system that delivers the full connectivity bandwidth to each server and supports both traditional and converged networks. The total available bandwidth can be dynamically allocated and simultaneously shared between servers based on demand. The network and storage connectivity to the servers is managed as a single entity through a management console.
