HP DL360 10 Gigabit Ethernet technology for industry-standard servers - Page 11

partition by setting it to a user-defined portion of the total 10Gb connection. Speed can be set from 100 Megabits per second to 10 Gigabits per second in 100 Megabit increments. There are advantages to partitioning a 10 GbE pipeline: More NIC connections per server, which is especially important in a virtual machine environment. Ability to match bandwidths to the network function (a few examples are virtual machine migration, management console, and production data) Flex-10 technology hardware uses two components: either the 10Gb Flex-10 LAN-on-motherboard (LOM) or the HP NC532m Flex-10 10GbE Network Adapter mezzanine card, shown in Figure 6; and the HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 10Gb Ethernet Module, shown in Figure 7. The 10Gb Flex-10 LOM and mezzanine cards are dual 10Gb port NICs. Each 10Gb port can be configured from one to a maximum of four individual FlexNIC‟s. Each FlexNIC is recognized by the server ROM and the operating system or hypervisor as an individual NIC. Figure 6. The HP NC532m Flex-10 10GbE Network Adapter The HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 10Gb Ethernet Module, shown in Figure 7, is required to manage the 10 GbE (Flex-10) server connections to the data center network. The Flex-10 10Gb Ethernet Module recognizes and manages each FlexNIC as part of a server profile3. 3 "Server profiles" are HP software constructs that define characteristics of both physical and virtual servers. For more on HP server profiles, see the link to "Introducing logical servers: Making data center infrastructures more adaptive" in the "for more information" section at the end of this paper. 11