Ethernet PCIe Sharing
VIO-4004 Ethernet PCIe Sharing Appliance
The VIO-4004 PCIe Sharing Appliance consolidates and virtualizes network connectivity to a rack of servers and provides up to 80 Gbps of Ethernet uplink bandwidth to the connected servers. The VIO-4004 also increases the capability of virtualized servers by providing VMs with the highest flexibility forconnectivity bandwidth and configurable access to I/O. It removes the physical Ethernet NICs from servers within a rack, leaving the servers as compute and memory engines. The10 GbE NICs are pooled and consolidated within the VIO-4004, from which you create virtual images of the I/O adapters (vNICs) that are presented to each server. The vNICs emulate physical NICs and don’t require any changes to the servers, OS, applications or I/O device drivers. The VIO-4004 enables multiple servers to simultaneously access and share the physical adapters.
The VIO-4004 PCIe Sharing Appliance connects to up to 16 servers using a PCI Express® (PCIe) cables that connect to the server-native PCIe bus and provides 16 Gbps bandwidth per connection to each server. The PCIe cable replaces multiple Ethernet cables per server. The VIO-4004 provides up to four 10 GbE uplinks to servers and connects directly to corporate networks without any additional fabric nor layer 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 PCIe Sharing Appliance enables servers to be wired once and dynamically reconfigured with different Ethernet profiles without any physical reconfiguration. The available bandwidth can be dynamically allocated among and optimized between servers based on demand. The network connectivity to the servers is managed and optimized through a web-based management console or a command-line interface.
