HPE Ethernet 10/25Gb 2-port FLR-SFP28

The HPE Ethernet 25Gb 2-port 640 FLR-SFP28 Adapter is a FlexibleLOM network card designed for select HPE ProLiant Gen9 DL rack servers and HPE Apollo servers. It provides two SFP28 ports with 25GbE throughput and backward compatibility with 10GbE, delivering increased bandwidth and network capabilities for service providers, telecommunications, financial institutions and enterprise data centers facing growing mobile and video traffic.

Advantages

The adapter offloads overlay networking tasks (VXLAN and NVGRE) from the host to reduce impact on server performance and to increase VM migration flexibility and network scale. It supports RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) to bypass the TCP/IP stack and reduce latency, improving performance for applications such as Hyper-V Live Migration, Microsoft SQL and SMB Direct workloads. The included Messaging Accelerator (VMA) firmware further reduces latency, increases throughput and improves CPU utilization for high-message-rate scenarios.

Key specifications

• Form factor: FlexibleLOM (FLR-SFP28) compatible with select HPE ProLiant Gen9 DL and HPE Apollo servers
• Ports: 2 × SFP28
• Nominal speed: 25GbE per port with auto-negotiation to 10GbE
• Overlay offload: VXLAN and NVGRE tunnel offload
• RDMA support: RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet)
• Messaging acceleration: VMA firmware included

How to use

Install the FlexibleLOM adapter into the designated FlexibleLOM slot on a supported HPE ProLiant Gen9 DL or HPE Apollo server following HPE installation guidelines. Connect SFP28 transceivers and appropriate fiber or DAC cabling to the two ports. Configure network settings in the server operating system or hypervisor, enable tunnel offload for VXLAN/NVGRE if required, and enable RoCE and VMA features as supported by the OS and drivers to achieve lower latency and higher throughput.

Recommendations

Use compatible SFP28 optics or direct-attach cables and verify firmware and driver versions are up to date. For low-latency workloads, enable RoCE and VMA in a supported environment and validate network switch configuration for lossless Ethernet where required.