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11
Configuring NIC
Partitioning and Managing
Bandwidth
This chapter provides the following information on NIC partitioning (NPAR) and
managing bandwidth:
“Configuring for NPAR” on page 177
“Configuration Parameters” on page 177
Overview
NPAR divides a Cavium 8400/3400 Series 10GbE 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 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/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
