QLogic BR-1860 Fabric - Manual (Page 2)

BR0058006-00 Rev. A 03/14 2
QLogic BR-1860 Data Sheet
Organizations have the flexibility to choose, on a port-by-port basis, the
adapter type and connectivity protocol that are most appropriate for their
applications and their business requirements. This unmatched flexibility
allows organizations to standardize on a single adapter for all of their
connectivity needs. IT departments can realize capital and operational
savings by consolidating multiple lower-speed Fibre Channel Host Bus
Adapters and 1GbE NICs into a single adapter, acquiring space-efficient
1U rack-mount servers, connecting to existing Fibre Channel and Ethernet
networks without requiring additional switch ports, and future-proofing
their data centers for a seamless transition to multiprotocol networks.
Delivering full-duplex, line-rate 16Gbps Fibre Channel and 10GbE speeds,
and over one million IOPS per dual-port adapter for storage applications—
including Fibre Channel, FCoE, and iSCSI—the QLogic BR-1860 is the ideal
platform to support the most demanding mission-critical workloads in the
largest data centers. The BR-1860 supports full FCoE protocol offload as
well as stateless networking offloads for 10GbE, including TCP checksum
and segmentation offloads for improved performance and more efficient
CPU utilization.
DESIGNED FOR THE PRIVATE CLOUD
Virtualization is transforming the data center, essentially moving the
access layer of the network into the server. In addition to virtualizing I/O
devices to allow them to be shared by the VMs, hypervisors have become,
by necessity, software-based Ethernet switches that provide networking
services for VMs—using CPU cycles and hindering virtualization scalability
and performance. Even with the most powerful processors, at 16Gbps
Fibre Channel and 10GbE speeds, hypervisors simply cannot keep up with
I/O, and line-rate performance becomes impossible to achieve.
By implementing virtual machine optimized ports (VMOPs), the BR-1860
leverages hypervisor multiqueue technologies such as VMware
® NetQueue
and Microsoft ® VMQ to offload the incoming network packet classification
and sorting tasks from the hypervisor onto the adapter, freeing the CPU
and enabling line-rate performance.
I/O Virtualization (IOV) and Virtual Switching
The BR-1860 supports QLogic virtual Fabric Link (vFLink) technology,
which partitions a single adapter into as many as eight virtual adapters
called vNICs. This is done in hardware by using multiple physical functions
(PFs) at the PCIe
® bus level, appearing as separate physical devices at the
OS level. These virtual links can be assigned minimum and/or maximum
bandwidth levels allocated in 100Mbps increments, with a maximum of
10Gbps for Ethernet. This helps organizations overcome the proliferation of
adapters in virtual environments while maintaining management isolation
and quality of service (QoS) for different types of networks, including
production, backup, management, or live migration (Figure 2).
To further improve performance in virtual environments, VMs can bypass
the hypervisor and access I/O devices directly, leveraging server chipset
technologies such as Intel
® virtualization technology for directed I/O (VT-d)
or AMD ® I/O virtualization (AMD-Vi).
The BR-1860 will help organizations overcome this limitation through
its ability to support the PCI-SIG
® single root input/output virtualization
(SR-IOV) specification 1 , which extends QLogic vFLink technology to support
up to 255 virtual fabric links. SR-IOV utilizes PCIe virtual functions (VFs),
which are lightweight PCI functions that are assigned to the VMs while
the hypervisor retains control of the underlying PF. SR-IOV enables an
efficient sharing of I/O devices for VMs as well as direct I/O for increased
performance (Figure 3).
1 SR-IOV is hardware capable.
Ethernet Fibre Channel
QLogic BR-1860 Fabric Adapters
Brocade Network Advisor
Orchestration
Figure 1. BR-1860 Fabric Adapter technology extends Fibre Channel and Ethernet fabric
services to the VMs and applications
Figure 2. QLogic vFLink I/O virtualization technology enables I/O consolidation