- Delivers greater throughput
- Allows these virtual interfaces and adapters to be configured and operated independently, just like physical interfaces and adapters
- Creates a highly flexible I/O environment needing only one card for all I/O configurations
- Unifies virtual and physical networking into a single infrastructure
- Provides virtual machine visibility from the physical network and a consistent network operations model for physical and virtual servers
- Enables configurations and policies to follow the virtual machine during virtual machine migration
- Provides a prestandard implementation of the IEEE 802.1Qbh port extender standard
- Enables the mezzanine card to be centrally managed and configured by Cisco UCS manager
- Provides a redundant path to the fabric interconnect using hardware-based fabric failover
- Provides high I/O performance for demanding applications
- Uses Priority Flow Control (PFC) to enable FCoE as part of the Cisco unified fabric
The Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) is a data center platform that unites compute, network, storage access, and virtualization resources into a cohesive system designed to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase business agility. The system integrates a low-latency, lossless 10 Gigabit Ethernet unified network fabric with enterprise-class, x86-architecture servers. The system is an integrated, scalable, multichassis platform in which all resources participate in a unified management domain.
The Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC) 1280 is an eight-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)-capable mezzanine card designed exclusively for Cisco UCS B-series blade servers. The card enables a policy-based, stateless, agile server infrastructure that can present up to 256 PCIe standards-compliant interfaces to the host that can be dynamically configured as either network interface cards (NICs) or host bus adapters (HBAs). In addition, the Cisco UCS VIC 1280 supports Cisco Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX) technology, which extends the Cisco UCS fabric interconnect ports to virtual machines, simplifying server virtualization deployment.