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- Description
- Specifications
Option 00FP650, feature code A5RK, is the Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro ML2 2x40GbE/FDR VPI Adapter. It is a mezzanine LOM (ML2) card, so it uses the server's dedicated ML2 slot rather than a PCIe slot.
VPI (Virtual Protocol Interconnect) means each port can run as Ethernet or as InfiniBand. Lenovo describes ConnectX-3 Pro adapters as offloading RDMA and send/receive processing from the CPU, with RDMA extending to virtual machines when SR-IOV is enabled.
What the Pro version adds over the plain ConnectX-3 is VXLAN and NVGRE offload engines, which speed up overlay network processing in public and private clouds.
Lenovo lists it in the x3550 M5 (5463 and 8869) and x3650 M5 (5462 and 8871) guides with a maximum of one, in the x3850 X6 (3837) guide with one and in the x3850 X6 and x3950 X6 (6241) guides with one and two respectively. The site also listed the x3750 M4, which we could not confirm in a Lenovo document.
Fit check: needs a free ML2 slot and QSFP cabling for 40GbE or FDR. 00D9550 is the PCIe ConnectX-3 40GbE/FDR card for servers without a free ML2 slot, and 00D2026 is the ML2 10GBase-T alternative.
| 00FP650 Specs | |
| Option | 00FP650 |
| Feature code | A5RK |
| Controller | Mellanox ConnectX-3 Pro |
| Ports | 2, 40GbE or FDR InfiniBand (VPI) |
| Form factor | ML2 (mezzanine LOM gen 2) |
| Offloads | RDMA, VXLAN/NVGRE |
| Virtualization | SR-IOV |
| Max per server | 1 (x3950 X6: 2) |