Cisco Cisco UCS P81E Virtual Interface Card Fiche De Données

 

 

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Data Sheet 

Cisco UCS P81E Virtual Interface Card  

 

Cisco UCS C-Series Overview 

Cisco

®

 UCS C-Series Rack-Mount Servers extend unified computing innovations to an industry-standard form 

factor to help reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase business agility. Designed to operate both in 

standalone environments and as part of the Cisco Unified Computing System

™

, the series employs Cisco 

technology to help customers handle the most challenging workloads. The series incorporates a standards-based 

unified network fabric, Cisco VM-FEX virtualization support, and Cisco Extended Memory Technology. It supports 

an incremental deployment model and protects customer investments with a future migration path to unified 

computing. 

Product Overview 

A Cisco innovation, the Cisco UCS P81E Virtual Interface Card is a virtualization-optimized Fibre Channel over 

Ethernet (FCoE) PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0 x8 10-Gbps adapter designed for use with Cisco UCS C-Series Rack-

Mount Servers. The virtual interface card is a dual-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe adapter that can support up to 

128 PCIe standards-compliant virtual interfaces, which can be dynamically configured so that both their interface 

type (network interface card [NIC] or host bus adapter [HBA]) and identity (MAC address and worldwide name 

[WWN]) are established using just-in-time provisioning. In addition, the Cisco UCS P81E can support network 

interface virtualization and Cisco VM-FEX technology. 

Features and Benefits 

Unique to the Cisco Unified Computing System, the Cisco UCS P81E is optimized for virtualized environments, for 

organizations that seek increased mobility in their physical environments, and for data centers that want reduced 

TCO through NIC, HBA, cabling, and switch reduction. 

The Cisco UCS P81E can present up to 128 virtual interfaces on a given server. The 128 virtual interfaces can be 

dynamically configured by Cisco UCS Manager as either Fibre Channel or Ethernet devices (Figure 1). Initially, the 

Cisco UCS P81E will support up to 2 Fibre Channel and 16 Ethernet devices. The number of virtual interfaces will 

be increased over time. With Cisco UCS P81E, deployment of applications that require or benefit from multiple 

Ethernet and Fibre Channel interfaces is no longer constrained by the available physical adapters. 

To an operating system or a hypervisor running on a Cisco UCS C-Series Rack-Mount Server, the virtual interfaces 

appear as regular PCIe devices. In a virtualized environment, Cisco VM-FEX technology allows virtual links to be 

centrally configured and managed without the complexity that traditional approaches interpose with multiple 

switching layers in virtualized environments. I/O configurations and network profiles move along with virtual 

machines, helping increase security and efficiency while reducing complexity. As a result of close cooperation 

between Cisco and VMware, network policies and virtual interfaces can be applied to virtual machines in VMware 

vCenter. The partnership also enables pass-through switching in the virtual switch, improving hypervisor 

performance.