Cisco Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card 1280 White Paper
© 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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White Paper
Unify Virtual and Physical Networking with Cisco
Virtual Interface Card
Virtual Interface Card
Simplicity of Cisco VM-FEX technology and Power of VMware VMDirectPath
What You Will Learn
Server virtualization has added a new level of network management complexity. Virtual switches within each
physical host have increased the number of network management points by an order of magnitude and have
challenged the traditional administrator roles and workflows. Virtual switching within the hypervisor also taxes host
CPU resources and has associated overheads that affect virtual machine I/O performance.
Cisco
®
VM-FEX technology addresses the manageability and performance concerns by consolidating the virtual
switch and physical switch into a single management point. The number of network management points is
dramatically reduced, and physical and virtual network traffic both are treated in a consistent policy driven manner.
Cisco Virtual Interface Card also implement VMDirectPath technology from VMware to effectively pass through the
hypervisor and significantly reduce associated overhead to improve virtual machine I/O performance.
Typical Virtual Switching Infrastructure
Figure 1. Hypervisor Virtual Switch and Physical Switch Managed Separately and Features and Performance Vary Between
Physical and Virtual Switching
Server virtualization introduces the need to support local switching between different virtual machines within the
same server. Each virtual machine instantiates a virtual network interface card (vNIC) logically and connects to the
virtual switch to send and receive network traffic. If two virtual machines attached to the same virtual switch need
to communicate with each other, the virtual switch performs the Layer 2 switching function directly, without