NIC Partitioning: Broadcom NetXtreme II® Network Adapter User Guide
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NIC Partitioning: Broadcom NetXtreme II
®
Network Adapter
User Guide
Overview
Configuring for NIC Partitioning
Overview
NIC partitioning (NPAR) divides a Broadcom NetXtreme II 10 Gigabit Ethernet NIC into multiple virtual NICs by having
multiple PCI physical functions per port. Each PCI function is associated with a different virtual NIC. To the OS and the
network, each physical function appears as a separate NIC port.
NOTE: Link speed cannot be configured for 1 Gbps when NPAR is enabled.
The number of partitions for each port is from one to four; thus, making a dual-port NIC capable of a maximum of eight
partitions. Each partition behaves as if it is an independent NIC port.
NOTE: On dual-port adapters:
The 1G ports do not support NPAR.
On 10G ports, only two functions per port are supported.
Benefits of a partitioned 10G NIC include:
Reduced cabling and ports when used to replace many 1G NICs.
Server segmentation with separate subnets/VLANs.
High server availability with NIC failover and NIC link bandwidth aggregation.
Server I/O virtualization with a virtual OS and monolithic OS support.
Changes to the OS is not required.
SLB type teaming is supported.
Supported Operating Systems for NIC Partitioning
The Broadcom NetXtreme II 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters support NIC partitioning on the following operating systems:
Windows Server 2008 family
Windows Server 2012 family
Linux 64-bit, RHEL 5.5 and later, SLES11 SP1 and later
VMware ESX, ESXi 4.1, ESXi 5.0, and ESXi 5.1.
NOTE: 32-bit Linux operating systems have a limited amount of memory space available for Kernel data structures.
Therefore, it is recommended that only 64-bit Linux be used when configuring NPAR.
Configuring for NIC Partitioning
When NIC partitioning is enabled on an adapter, by default, only TCP Offload Engine (TOE) offloads are configured on each
physical function (PF). You must explicitly configure storage offloads on a PF to use FCoE and iSCSI offload functionality on an
adapter.
NIC partitioning can be configured using Broadcom's Comprehensive Configuration Management (CCM) utility. Some vendors
provide a proprietary utility to configure NPAR. If this is the case, refer to the vendor-provided documentation for information
on configuring NPAR on Broadcom NetXtreme II-10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters.
