E9000 - [SR-IOV] vs [UMC]

UMC, that is, multi-PF. Each physical 10GE port can be divided into four PFs (logical channels). Each NIC supports a total of 16 PFs. The four PFs derived from each physical 10GE port can be configured as four NICs (four native Ethernet logical channels) or three NICs and one FCoE/iSCSI (three native Ethernet logical channels and one storage logical channel). Each PF must be assigned a VLAN ID and channel bandwidth. The four PFs on a physical 10GE port are independent of each other, and share the 10 Gbit/s bandwidth of the 10GE port. The UMC feature leverages the PCIe function defined in PCI-SIG specifications, independent of the operating system (OS) or Hypervisor.
SR-IOV is available only when UMC is disabled. When UMC is disabled, the NIC supports a maximum of four physical functions (10GE physical ports) and 112 VFs. Each PF supports a maximum of 28 VFs. When UMC is enabled, the NIC supports a maximum of 8 PFs and does not support VFs.
The VFs derived from each PF can be assigned to virtual machines (VMs). In this way, the mapping between VFs and VMs is set up.In VMware, each physical port (PF) supports a maximum of 16 VFs.