This diagram is a sample design of Cisco UCS running vSphere 4.0 utilizing the VMWare vSwitch and Cisco’s virtualization mezzanine adapter. The Cisco adapter is a dual port 10GE Converged Network Adapter supporting Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Network Interface Virtualization (NIV). The Cisco adapter is “virtual” in the sense that this single physical adapter can be carved up into as many as 128 virtual adapters. Each virtual adapter is then exposed to the operating system as a unique physical adapter. The virtual adapters can be either Ethernet (vNIC) or Fibre Channel (vHBA). This is just one of many possible VMWare + Cisco UCS designs I will be depicting in a series of future posts.