The Cisco UCS M81KR helps reduce the number of physical adapters, simplify management, increase hypervisor performance, and facilitate collaboration between groups. UCS M81KR supports Multiple virtual adapters per physical adapter. Using M81KR you can dynamically create I/O devices as per your need. The virtual interfaces on the M81KR can be easily and dynamically configured by Cisco UCS Manager as either Fibre Channel or Ethernet devices. UCS M81KR presently supports up to 58 virtual adapters (vNICs or vHBAs). The virtual adapters are hot pluggable, i.e they appear only when defined. The adapter is PCIe standards compliant and it supports single-OS & VM-based deployments.
The UCS M81KR creates virtual adapters and map them to different virtual machines in a VMware deployment using Cisco VN-Link technology in hardware. It provides policy-based virtual machine connectivity and enables policies to persist after VMware VMotion migration. VN-Link, implemented in hardware, connects virtual machines directly to virtual interfaces on the fabric interconnect and helps free CPU cycles that are normally used to provide networking functions on the server, resulting in better virtual server performance. The UCS M81KR allows each virtual machine to directly access the adapter hardware, bypassing the hypervisor completely, this capability relieves some of the computing burden on the hypervisor and further improves performance.
Benefits of UCS M81KR:
a) Allows you to apply network policy, like L2 security, ACLs, QoS, Rate limiting.
b) Supports both I/O consolidation & virtualization.
c) The fabric is Active/Standy capable.
d) Multiple interfaces on single PCIe port and single network port.
e) Allows for per VM interface management/traffic in Virtualized environments.
f) Supports Per interface VLAN membership, Rate Limiting, QOS membership.
g) Each interface can be put into Access mode (No OS Trunking driver needed).
h) No Bonding driver needed for Active/Standby operations.
