Users Guide

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12 NIC Partitioning and
Bandwidth Management
NIC partitioning and bandwidth management covered in this chapter includes:
 Overview
 “Configuring for NIC Partitioning” on page 208
Overview
NIC partitioning (NPAR) divides a Marvell BCM57xx and BCM57xxx 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.
The quantity 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 and VLANs.
 High server availability with NIC failover and NIC link bandwidth
aggregation.
 Server I/O virtualization with a virtual OS and monolithic OS support.
 No change to the OS is required.
 Switch-independent type teaming is supported.