Qlogic 8400 Series, User Manual

Page: 280 / 391

250 83840-546-00 D
12
NIC Partitioning and
Bandwidth Management

Overview

Configuring for NIC Partitioning

Configuration Parameters
For information about configuring NIC partitioning, see the Setting up NPAR with
QCS or CCM for Windows User’s Guide .
Overview
NIC partitioning divides a QLogic 8400/3400 Series 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. This Switch Independent
Partitioning is also known as vNIC2 or Virtual NIC2 by IBM.
The number of partitions for each port can range from one to four; thus, a
dual-port NIC can have up to eight partitions. Each partition behaves as if it is an
independent NIC port.
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 virtual OS support.

No change to the OS is required.

SLB type teaming is supported.