Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card 1285

Superior Flexibility and Performance

The Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC) 1285 offers dual-port Enhanced Quad Small Form-Factor Pluggable (QSFP) 40 Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) in a half-height PCI Express (PCIe) card designed exclusively for Cisco Unified Computing (UCS) C-Series Rack Servers. The VIC 1285 adapter provides acceleration for new operational modes introduced by server virtualization. It brings superior flexibility, performance, and bandwidth to the UCS rack-mount servers.

Features and Capabilities

The Cisco UCS VIC 1285 works with Cisco Nexus 40 Gb switches for high-performance applications, including Cisco Nexus 6004, 3016Q and 3132Q Switches.

The VIC 1285 implements Cisco Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX), which unifies virtual and physical networking into a single infrastructure. This adapter provides virtual-machine visibility from the physical network and a consistent network operations model for physical and virtual servers.

In virtualized environments, the highly configurable and self-virtualized 1285 adapters provide integrated, modular LAN interfaces on Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers. Additional features and capabilities are listed below.

Cisco usNIC technology - Cisco usNIC is a low-latency interface on top of Cisco UCS VIC 1285. The interface consists of a set of software libraries that can enable a data path bypassing the kernel.

Higher performance - The VIC 1285 supports up to 256 PCI Express (PCIe) virtual devices, and either virtual network interface cards (vNICs) or virtual host bus adapters (vHBAs). It offers high I/O operations per second (IOPS), support for lossless Ethernet, and up to 64 Gbps to servers based on maximum PCIe bandwidth.

In a non-UCS managed environment, the VIC 1285 will support up to 16 vNICs and two vHBAs.

Better bandwidth - A PCIe Generation 2 x16 interface helps assure optimal bandwidth to the host for network-intensive applications with a redundant path to the fabric interconnect.

Advanced features - Second-generation VICs support advanced features such as Netflow for network traffic modeling, and NetQueue for balancing and shaping virtual machine traffic loads. Accelerated Receive Flow Steering improves packet processing efficiency.

The adapters offer support for Microsoft Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux, VMware vSphere, and Citrix XenServer. (Cisco UCS VIC 1285 must be connected to a 40 Gb Cisco Nexus Fabric Extender)