those cables from each 10GB HBA or iSCSI

I am writing this post to provide you guidelines on how you can divide a 10GB CNA card on your ESXi server to meet all the network and storage requirements. Before that, let’s have a look at what is the 10Gig CNA and what are the brands available in the market available for this technology.

A 10GB CNA card Converged Network Adapter is an card on a server, that combines the functionality of a host bus adapter (HBA) with a network interface controller. In other words it "converges" access to, respectively, a storage area network and a general-purpose computer network. As simple as it sounds, it makes things simple in the datacenter as well. Instead of running down those cables from each 10GB HBA or iSCSI cards, you can just use a single cable to do all these tasks for you. This is because the 10GB CNA card is converged and can carry all the traffic on a single physical interface.

With most of my recent projects customers are moving towards the 10GB CNA converged adapters to achieve the benefits of consolidation of network and storage especially on Blade Server Architecture Let's say you bought 10GB CNA which gives you 4 virtual ports per physical port, let’s see how we can divide the bandwidth of this physical port amongst the virtual port to both Storage and Network Communication.