Deployment Guide

5 Network Partition (NPAR) Technology and VMware Virtual Switch comparison using QLogic BCM57800 | version 1.0
2 QLogic BCM57800 Series NPAR with VMware’s VSS
QLogic’s NPAR technology helps simplify a data center’s network and storage infrastructure in two distinct
ways:
 When using chassis-based blade servers that are limited to two or three PCIe slots, NPAR can
increase the uplink ports in VMware by a factor of eight
o Rack-based servers, which typically ship with up to eight PCIe slots, can supply enough
physical dual- or quad-port network adapters for uplink ports. Since VMware 6.0’s maximum
limitation per ESXi host of uplink ports is sixteen 10GbE ports and four 1GbE ports, NPAR is
not needed
 When implementing bandwidth management, QLogic’s BCM57800 series network adapters have an
easy-to-use, transmit-based global bandwidth allocation configuration menu
QLogic’s NPAR technology also offers the following benefits:
 Support for up to eight partitions per CNA and up to four partitions per CNA port
 Support for monolithic operating systems and hypervisors—Microsoft Windows, Linux, and VMware
operating systems (OS)
 No OS or BIOS changes required
 Pre-OS operations for boot from SAN or PXE
 Agnostic switch support for industry-standard 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) switches
 NIC control of the transmit flow rate from the server
 Flexible and dynamic bandwidth allocation
 Comprehensive support for standard network offload technologies including:
• Large send offload
• TCP/IP and TCP/UDP
• TCP checksum offload
• Receive-side scaling
• Transparent Packet Aggregation (TPA)
 Support for the TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE) and Internet SCSI (iSCSI) host bus adapters (HBAs).
 Support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)