Switch Independent Partitioning Configuration; What Is Switch Independent Partitioning - Dell QMD8262-k User Manual

4–Switch Independent Partitioning

Switch Independent Partitioning Configuration

Switch Independent Partitioning Configuration
This section defines Switch Independent Partitioning configuration and describes
the configuration options and the management tools you can use to set up Switch
Independent Partitioning on QLogic adapters installed in 11th and 12th generation
Dell PowerEdge blade servers.
In addition to defining what Switch Independent Partitioning is, this section describes:


What Is Switch Independent Partitioning?

 Switch Independent Partitioning Options
 Personality Changes
 Quality of Service
 eSwitch
 Configuration Management Tools
What Is Switch Independent Partitioning?
Switch Independent Partitioning provides the ability to create multiple physical
functions on the PCIe bus that share a single physical port. Each physical function
is a PCI endpoint (PCIe) that can have a device driver attached to it.
The Switch Independent Partitioning feature in QLogic adapters allows you to
partition a single 10GbE NIC port into up to four individual partitions with
user-configurable bandwidth and interface type (personality). The partitioning
options are not limited to NIC; they extend to converged fabric partitioning by
enabling you to assign iSCSI or FCoE protocols to certain partitions.
For example, each partition can be either native Ethernet NIC or configured to
support iSCSI or FCoE storage devices with different PCIe endpoint device class
code (subject to the restrictions listed in
FCoE operate in full hardware offload mode.
The Dell/QLogic Switch Independent Partitioning solution is OS and switch
agnostic, which means Switch Independent Partitioning does not require a
proprietary switch to operate; however, the adapter does require the OS-specific
QLogic adapter driver for each supported protocol (NIC, iSCSI, and FCoE). The
solution also means Switch Independent Partitioning bandwidth allocation can
only regulate transmit traffic but not receive traffic.
After you have configured the NIC partitions as needed on the adapter ports, you
must reboot the Dell PowerEdge server to make the personality changes take
effect.
Table 4-4 on page
126
130). Both iSCSI and
CU0354602-00 L