Mezzanine adapters

A huge variety of mezzanine adapters, also known as Virtual Interface Cards (VICs), is available from Cisco for both B-Series blade servers and C-Series rack servers. Older adapters are fixed port and not optimized for contemporary virtualized server environments. There are some older third-party network cards also available as an option. Newer third-generation adapters are optimized for virtualization and can provide 256 dynamic virtual adapters. The number of virtual adapters is dependent on the VIC model. These virtual adapters can be configured as Ethernet (vNIC) or Fibre Channel (vHBA) devices. All virtualization-optimized VICs also support VM-FEX technology. Our focus will be on the mezzanine adapters, which are virtualization optimized.