📦 Product Overview

The Intel X710-DA2 is a high-performance dual-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapter designed for use in servers, high-end workstations, and networking appliances. It delivers low latency, high throughput, and advanced offload capabilities, making it ideal for virtualization, software-defined networking, storage, and ISP infrastructure.

This adapter uses SFP+ (Small Form-factor Pluggable Plus) interfaces, allowing flexible choice of fiber or Direct Attach Copper (DAC) optics to suit distance and connectivity needs.

⚙️ Key Specifications

🧠 Form Factor

• PCIe (PCI Express) Network Adapter
• Typically PCIe 3.0 x8 (backward compatible with x4 lanes)

🛜 Network Interfaces

• 2 × 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) ports
• SFP+ connectors (transceivers not included)
• Use fiber SFP+ optics (e.g., SR, LR) or DAC twinax cables

🚀 Performance

• 10 Gbps per port for full wire-rate throughput
• Low latency and high packet processing speed

💾 Bus Interface

• PCIe 3.0 ×8 (can operate in ×4 mode as well)
• Designed for high I/O bandwidth

⭐ Core Features

🔹 High Throughput & Low Latency

• Delivers full line-rate 10 GbE on both ports
• Suitable for demanding workloads like storage traffic, virtualization, and high-speed uplinks

🔹 Flexible Connectivity

• SFP+ form factor supports:
• Fiber optics (single-mode/multi-mode)
• DAC (Direct Attach Copper) cables for short-reach connections
• Allows operators to pick optics based on distance and network layout

🔹 Advanced Offloads

Built-in hardware offloading helps offload tasks from the host CPU, improving overall system performance:

• Checksum offload
• Large Send Offload (LSO)
• TCP/UDP segmentation offload
• VLAN tagging offload
• Receive Side Scaling (RSS)

These features improve throughput and efficiency, especially with virtualization and high packet rates.

🔹 Virtualization-Friendly

• Supports key virtualization enhancements:
• SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) — for performance isolation in VMs
• VM-Device Queues (VMDq) — for better multi-tenant traffic handling

This makes it popular in hypervisor environments such as VMware ESXi, Hyper-V, and KVM.

🔹 Energy Efficient

• Intel Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) support reduces power when traffic is low
• Good balance between performance and power consumption

🧩 Compatibility

📌 Operating Systems

The X710-DA2 is supported on major server and workstation OSes:

• Windows Server
• Linux distributions (RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu, SUSE)
• VMware ESXi
• FreeBSD (with appropriate drivers)

Driver support is included in many enterprise Linux kernels and VMware drivers.

🧠 Hardware Compatibility

• Compatible with any system that has a free PCIe slot (x8/x16) and BIOS that supports PCIe 3.0/2.0 devices.
• Works well with server platforms from major vendors (Dell, HP, Lenovo etc.) assuming driver availability.

🔌 Transceiver / Cabling Options

You can use:

• 10G SFP+ SR/LR optics for fiber connections
• 10G DAC cables for short copper links in racks
• Optics and cabling are chosen based on deployment distance and environment