Users Guide

1–Functionality and Features
Features
4 BC0054508-00 J
 Virtualization:
 Microsoft
®
 VMware
®
 Linux
®
 XenServer
®
 Single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV)
iSCSI
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has standardized iSCSI. SCSI is a
popular protocol that enables systems to communicate with storage devices,
using block-level transfer (that is, address data stored on a storage device that is
not a whole file). iSCSI maps the SCSI request/response application protocols
and its standardized command set over TCP/IP networks.
Because iSCSI uses TCP as its sole transport protocol, it greatly benefits from
hardware acceleration of the TCP processing. However, iSCSI as a Layer 5
protocol has additional mechanisms beyond the TCP layer. iSCSI processing can
also be offloaded, thereby reducing CPU utilization even further.
The QLogic BCM57xx and BCM57xxx adapter targets best-system performance,
maintains system flexibility to changes, and supports current and future OS
convergence and integration. Therefore, the adapter's iSCSI offload architecture
is unique as evident by the split between hardware and host processing.
FCoE
FCoE allows Fibre Channel protocol to be transferred over Ethernet. FCoE
preserves existing Fibre Channel infrastructure and capital investments. The
following FCoE features are supported:
 Full stateful hardware FCoE offload
 Receiver classification of FCoE and FCoE initialization protocol (FIP)
frames. FIP is used to establish and maintain connections.
 Receiver CRC offload
 Transmitter CRC offload
 Dedicated queue set for Fibre Channel traffic
 Data center bridging (DCB) provides lossless behavior with priority flow
control (PFC)
 DCB allocates a share of link bandwidth to FCoE traffic with enhanced
transmission selection (ETS)
 Supports Technical Committee T11 Fibre Channel - Link Services (FC-LS)
specification, N_Port ID virtualization (NPIV) on Linux and Windows.