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

DDynamic 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

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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