Ethernet Products
Determine ramifications of Intel® Ethernet products and technologies
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82576 vs i350

idata
Employee
10,633 Views

Hi all.

What difference of this chips? I350 is a new product, but it have only 8 queues, why? I need ethernet card for virtualization. What is better to buy?

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Mark_H_Intel
Employee
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Hi Nick,

The extra queue pairs in the Intel® 82576 Gigabit Ethernet Controller were never supported by any software and drivers. So both the Intel® Ethernet Controller I350 and the Intel® 82576 Gigabit Ethernet Controller support up to 8 virtual machine queues per port.

If you are going to buy quad port adapters, http://ark.intel.com/compare/49187,59063 a quick comparison of the Intel® Gigabit ET2 Quad Port Server Adapter and the Intel® Ethernet Server Adapter I350-T4 shows the latter to be the best choice with an edge in power efficiency and a faster PCIe bus rate. If you need IPSec offload capability in a gigabit adapter then you would need the older Intel® Gigabit ET2 Quad Port Server Adapter.

If you are running a lot of virtual machines on one server, you might want to consider a 10-gigabit adapter like the http://ark.intel.com/products/58954/Intel-Ethernet-Converged-Network-Adapter-X540-T2 Intel Ethernet Converged Network Adapter X540-T2. The adapter can be used in a gigabit network and will be ready for an infrastructure upgrade to 10-gigabit. As a bonus you will have 63 queues per port for virtual machine queues or for SR-IOV.

Mark H

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