UCS-B: iSCSI performance with M51KR-B BCM57711 vs Palo M81KR

[romanrodichev@iementor.com]

Cisco pushes M81KR card saying that there's no reason to use anything else. What about systems with iSCSI storage (ESXi boots from local drive, VMs are on iSCSI storage, no iSCSI boot)? Is there any performance advantages to using BCM57711 card? It has iSCSI TOE, while M81KR does not, isn't this enough of a reason to use BCM57711 for iSCSI environments?

[Robert Burns]

Roman,

You are correct that the current generation of M81KR VIC does not have the TOE for iSCSI as the broadcom card does.  However our adaptors are designed with adequate resources to provide similar performance. 

Let me see if I can dig up some performance metrics so you can compare.

Regards,

Robert