The Emulex VFA5.2 adapters support three methods to virtualize I/O, out of the box: Virtual Fabric Mode (vNIC1), Switch Independent mode (vNIC2) and Unified Fabric Port (UFP) mode. With Virtual Fabric, up to eight virtual network ports (vNICs) can be created with a single two-port 10 GbE network adapter.
On System x adapters, storage protocols such as iSCSI and FCoE are also supported by Features on Demand upgrades. Using a common hardware infrastructure for Ethernet and SAN and by virtualizing your network adapter, you can reduce your infrastructure capital expense.
Part number information
The part numbers to order these adapters are listed in the following table. The FCoE/iSCSI upgrade licenses are a Features on Demand field upgrade that enables full hardware offloaded converged networking capabilities of the adapters. Adapters 00AG580 and 01CV770 already includes the FCoE/iSCSI license.