User Manual

Driver FeaturesRev 2.2-1.0.1

Mellanox Technologies

To disable network administered vNics on the host side load mlx4_vnic module with the

net_admin module parameter set to 0.

4.3.2.3 VLAN Configuration

A vNic instance is associated with a specific vHub group. This vHub group is connected to a

BridgeX external port and has a

VLAN tag attribute. When creating/configuring a vNic you

define the VLAN tag it will use via the vid or the VNICVLAN fields (if these fields are absent,

the vNic will not have a VLAN tag). The vNic's VLAN tag will be present in all EoIB packets

sent by the vNics and will be verified on all packets received on the vNic. When passed from the

InfiniBand to Ethernet,the EoIB encapsulation will be disassembled but the VLAN tag will

remain.

For example, if the vNic "eth23" is associated with a vHub that uses BridgeX "bridge01", eport

"A10" and

VLAN tag 8, all incoming and outgoing traffic on eth23 will use a VLAN tag of 8.

This will be enforced by both BridgeX and destination hosts. When a packet is passed from the

internal fabric to the Ethernet subnet through the BridgeX it will have a "true" Ethernet VLAN

tag of 8.

The VLAN implementation used by EoIB uses operating systems unaware of VLANs. This is in

many ways similar to switch tagging in which an external Ethernet switch adds/strips tags on

traf

fic preventing the need of OS intervention. EoIB does not support OS aware VLANs in the

form of vconfig.

Configuring VLANs

To configure VLAN tag for a vNic, add the VLAN tag property to the configuration file in host

administrated mode, or configure the vNic on the appropriate vHub in network administered

mode. In the host administered mode when a vHub with the requested VLAN tag is not available,

the vNIC's login request will be rejected.

• Host administered VLAN configuration in centralized configuration file can be modi-

fied as follow:

Add "vid=<VLAN tag>" or remove vid property for no VLAN

• Host administered VLAN configuration with ifcfg-ethX configuration files can be mod-

ified as follow:

Add "VNICVLAN=<VLAN tag>" or remove VNICVLAN property for no VLAN

Using a VLAN tag value of 0 is not recommended because the traffic using it would

not be separated from non VLAN traffic.

For Host administered vNics, VLAN entry must be set in the BridgeX first. For further

information, please refer to BridgeX® documentation.