A thread started here on delltechcenter.com led me to do some investigation into an "iSCSI Ready" feature of the onboard Broadcom 5708 NICs on the PowerEdge R805. Turns out that the Broadcom 5708 or NetExtreme II NIC has the capability to be a TCIP/IP offload engine (TOE), which is a fairly well-known thing. It also can be a hardware-based iSCSI adapter with some iSCSI offload capability as well—which is the "iSCSI Ready" feature. It is also possible to use this adapter to boot from iSCSI as it is hardware based.

I had a really hard time finding the any documentation about how to configure and enable the iSCSI Ready feature, so I put together a really cool wiki page that has few screenshots and some basic guidance. Additionally, I did a quick performance test to see if it did indeed reduce CPU utilization. I found a small reduction with my test workload and posted a screenshot of that as well.

Todd