Users Guide
Table Of Contents
- Table of Contents
- 1 Regulatory and Safety Approvals
- 2 Functional Description
- 3 Network Link and Activity Indication
- 4 Features
- 4.1 Software and Hardware Features
- 4.2 Virtualization Features
- 4.3 VXLAN
- 4.4 NVGRE/GRE/IP-in-IP/Geneve
- 4.5 Stateless Offloads
- 4.6 Priority Flow Control
- 4.7 Virtualization Offload
- 4.8 SR-IOV
- 4.9 Network Partitioning (NPAR)
- 4.10 Security
- 4.11 RDMA over Converged Ethernet – RoCE
- 4.12 VMWare Enhanced Networking Stack (ENS)
- 4.13 Supported Combinations
- 4.14 Unsupported Combinations
- 5 Installing the Hardware
- 6 Software Packages and Installation
- 7 Updating the Firmware
- 8 Link Aggregation
- 9 System-Level Configuration
- 10 PXE Boot
- 11 SR-IOV – Configuration and Use Case Examples
- 12 NPAR – Configuration and Use Case Example
- 13 Tunneling Configuration Examples
- 14 RoCE – Configuration and Use Case Examples
- 15 DCBX – Data Center Bridging
- 16 DPDK – Configuration and Use Case Examples
- Revision History
Broadcom NetXtreme-E-UG304-2CS
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NetXtreme-E User Guide User Guide for Dell Platforms
12 NPAR – Configuration and Use Case Example
12.1 Features and Requirements
OS/BIOS Agnostic – The partitions are presented to the operating system as real network interfaces so no special
BIOS or OS support is required like SR-IOV.
Additional NIC functions without requiring additional switch ports, cabling, PCIe expansion slots.
Traffic Shaping – The allocation of bandwidth per partition can be controlled so as to limit or reserve as needed.
Can be used in a Switch Independent manner – The switch does not need any special configuration or knowledge of
the NPAR enablement.
Can be used in conjunction with RoCE and SR-IOV.
Supports stateless offloads such as, LSO, TPA, RSS/TSS, and RoCE (two PFs per port only).
Alternative Routing-ID support for greater than eight functions per physical device.
NOTE: In the UEFI HII Menu page, the NXE adapters support up to 16 PFs per device on an ARI capable system. For a
2-port device, this means up to 8 PFs for each port.
12.2 Limitations
Shared settings must be suppressed to avoid contention. For example: Speed, Duplex, Flow Control, and similar
physical settings are hidden by the device driver to avoid contention.
Non-ARI systems enable only eight partitions per physical device.
RoCE for BCM5741X adapters, is only supported on the first two partitions of each physical port, or a total of four
partitions per physical device. In NPAR + SR-IOV mode, only two VFs from each parent physical port can enable RDMA
support, or total of four VFs + RDMA per physical device. BCM9575XX adapters can support RoCE on all partitions.
NPAR + SR-IOV/MultiRSS is not supported with ESXi 7.0 for the BCM5741X.