Explanation/Reference:
The Cisco UCS VIC M81KR Virtual Interface Card is a type of adapter, or mezzanine card, available in a Cisco UCS blade server that directly supports virtualization. It supports NIC virtualization for either a single operating system or for VMware ESX. Inside a single operating system, each VIC is presented as a physical adapter. For VMware, a special feature allows the VIC to be presented directly to the guest operating system, bypassing the VMware virtual switch layer. This allows efficiency and also allows the Cisco UCS to reconfigure network infrastructure if virtual machines migrate between ESX server instances on different blade servers.
The UCS M81KR Virtual Interface Controller (VIC) for the Unified Computing System blade series has now been complemented by the UCS P81E Virtual Interface Card for use with Cisco UCS C-Series Rack-Mount Servers.