Adapter FEX and VM Fex

[Evgeniy Ivanov]

Hi!
I have a questions about Cisco Adapter FEX and VM Fex.
As i understand, Cisco Adapter FEX gives multiple vNIC on one mezzanine card, and each of them appears as virtual port on Fabric Interconnect.
Also, same thing for VM-FEX, each VM NIC appears as virtual port on Fabric Interconnect.

Am i right?

Thank you!

[Walter Dey]

Adaptor FEX is I/O adaptor virtualization, which is agnostic to the OS and therefore works in virtualized as well as non virtualized environments.

VM-FEX (also called Hypervisor Bypass) is available for different Hypervisors

• Cisco UCS Manager VM-FEX for Hyper-V CLI Configuration Guide, Release 2.2   

• Cisco UCS Manager VM-FEX for KVM CLI Configuration Guide, Release 2.2   

• Cisco UCS Manager VM-FEX for VMware CLI Configuration Guide, Release 2.2   

• Cisco UCS Manager VM-FEX for Hyper-V GUI Configuration Guide, Release 2.2   

• Cisco UCS Manager VM-FEX for KVM GUI Configuration Guide, Release 2.2   

• Cisco UCS Manager VM-FEX for VMware GUI Configuration Guide, Release 2.2   

• Cisco UCS Manager VM-FEX for Hyper-V CLI Configuration Guide, Release 2.1   

• Cisco UCS Manager VM-FEX for KVM CLI Configuration Guide, Release 2.1   

• Cisco UCS Manager VM-FEX for VMware CLI Configuration Guide, Release 2.1   

• Cisco UCS Manager VM-FEX for Hyper-V GUI Configuration Guide, Release 2.1   

• Cisco UCS Manager VM-FEX for KVM GUI Configuration Guide, Release 2.1   

• Cisco UCS Manager VM-FEX for VMware GUI Configuration Guide, Release 2.1   

• Cisco UCS Manager VM-FEX for KVM CLI Configuration Guide   

• Cisco UCS Manager VM-FEX for KVM GUI Configuration Guide   

• Cisco UCS Manager VM-FEX for VMware CLI Configuration Guide   

• Cisco UCS Manager VM-FEX for VMware GUI Configuration Guide   

example VM-FEX for VMware ESX

VM-FEX (previously known as VN-link) is a method to extend the network fabric completely down to the VMs. With VM-FEX, the Fabric Interconnects handle switching for the ESXi host's VMs. UCSM utilizes the vCenter dVS Application Programming Interfaces (API) to this end. Therefore, VM-FEX shows as a dVS in the ESXi host.

There are many benefits to VM-FEX:

• Reduced CPU overhead on the ESX host
• Faster performance
• VMware DirectPath I/O with vMotion support
• Network management moved up to the FIs rather than on the ESXi host
• Visibility into vSphere with UCSM