All Intel® Ethernet 700 Series Network Adapters

include these feature-rich technologies:

Flexible and Scalable I/O for Virtualized

Infrastructures

Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT) delivers

outstanding I/O performance in virtualized server

environments.

I/O bottlenecks are reduced through intelligent offloads

such as Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq) and

Flexible Port Partitioning, using SR-IOV with a common

Virtual Function driver for networking traffic per Virtual

Machine (VM), enabling near-native performance and

VM scalability. Host-based features supported include:

VMDq for Emulated Path: VMDq enables a hypervisor

to represent a single network port as multiple network

ports that can be assigned to the individual VMs. Traffic

handling is offloaded to the network controller,

delivering the benefits of port partitioning with little to

no administrative overhead by the IT staff.

SR-IOV for Direct Assignment: Adapter-based

isolation and switching for various virtual station

instances enables optimal CPU usage in virtualized

environments.

• Up to 128 VFs, each VF can support a unique and

separate data path for I/O related functions within the

PCI Express* hierarchy.

• Use of SR-IOV with a networking device, for example,

allows the bandwidth of a single port (function) to be

partitioned into smaller slices that can be allocated to

specific VMs or guests, via a standard interface.

Intel® Ethernet Adaptive Virtual Function (Intel®

Ethernet AVF): A virtual function driver that eases

SR-IOV hardware upgrades or changes, and preserves

base mode functionality in hardware and software.

Customers deploying mass-scale VMs or containers for

their network infrastructure now have a common Virtual

Function (VF) driver. This driver supports a Base Mode

and advanced set of features on the Intel® Ethernet

700 Series.

Enhanced Network Virtualization Overlays (NVO)

Network virtualization has changed the way networking

is done in the data center, delivering accelerations across

a wide range of tunneling methods.

VXLAN, GENEVE, NVGRE, MPLS, and VXLAN-GPE with

NSH Offloads: These stateless offloads preserve

application performance for overlay networks, and the

network traffic can be distributed across CPU cores,

increasing network throughput.

Flexible Port Partitioning (FPP)

FPP leverages the PCI-SIG SR-IOV specification. Virtual

controllers can be used by the Linux host directly and/ or

assigned to virtual machines.

• Assign up to 63 Linux host processes or virtual

machines per port to virtual functions.

• Control the partitioning of per port bandwidth across

multiple dedicated network resources, ensuring

balanced QoS by giving each assigned virtual

controller equal access to the ports bandwidth.

Network administrators can also rate limit each of these

services to control how much of the pipe is available to

each process.

Greater Intelligence and Performance for NFV and

Cloud deployments

Dynamic Device Personalization (DDP) customizable

packet filtering, along with enhanced Data Plane

Development Kit (DPDK), support advanced packet

forwarding and highly-efficient packet processing for

both Cloud and Network Functions Virtualization

(NFV) workloads.

• DDP enables workload-specific optimizations, using

the programmable packet-processing pipeline.

Additional protocols can be added to the default set

to improve packet processing efficiency that results in

higher throughput and reduced latency. With the Intel

Ethernet 700 Series, new protocols can be added or

modified on-demand, and applied at run-time using

Software Defined Firmware or APIs, eliminating the

need to reset or reboot the server. This not only keeps

the server and VMs up, running, and computing, it also

increases performance for VNFs that process

network traffic that is not included in the default

firmware. Download DDP Profiles

• DPDK provides a programming framework for Intel®

processors and enables faster development of

high-speed data packet networking applications.

Advanced Traffic Steering

Intel® Ethernet Flow Director (Intel® Ethernet FD) is an

advanced traffic steering capability built into the adapter.

It consists of a large number of flow affinity filters that

direct receive packets by their flows to queues for

classification, load balancing, and matching between

flows and CPU cores.

Steering traffic into specific queues can eliminate context

switching required within the CPU. As a result, Intel®

Ethernet FD significantly increases the number of

transactions per second and reduces latency for cloud

applications like memcached.

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