Vnic Groups - Lenovo Flex System Fabric CN4093 Application Manual

vNIC Groups

© Copyright Lenovo 2015
vNICs can be grouped together, along with internal and external switch ports and
trunks, into vNIC groups. Each vNIC group is essentially a separate virtual
network within the switch. Elements within a vNIC group have a common logical
function and can communicate with each other, while elements in different vNIC
groups are separated.
Lenovo N/OS 8.2 supports up to 32 independent vNIC groups. To enforce group
boundaries, each vNIC group is assigned its own unique VLAN.
The VLAN configured for the vNIC group will be automatically assigned to
member vNICs, ports, and trunks and should not be manually configured for
those elements.
Note: Once a VLAN is assigned to a vNIC group, that VLAN is used only for vNIC
purposes and is no longer available for other configuration. Likewise, any VLAN
configured for regular purposes cannot be configured as a vNIC group VLAN.
The vNIC group rules are as follows:
 vNIC groups may have one or more vNIC members. However, any given vNIC
can be a member of only one vNIC group.
 All vNICs on a given port must belong to different vNIC groups.
 Each vNIC group may contain traffic of one type only (either regular Ethernet,
iSCSI, or FCoE). Traffic of different types may not be mixed within any vNIC
group.
External ports that are part of a trunk may not be individually added to a vNIC

group. Only one individual external port, one static trunk, or one dynamic trunk
(consisting of multiple external ports) may be added to any given vNIC group.
 In dedicated mode, for any internal ports, external port, or port trunk group
connected to regular (non‐vNIC) devices:
These elements can be placed in only one vNIC group (they cannot be

members of multiple vNIC groups).
Once added to a vNIC group, the PVID for the element is automatically set to

use the vNIC group VLAN number, and PVID tagging on the element is
automatically disabled.
 By default, STP is disabled on any external port added to a vNIC group. STP can
be re‐enabled on the port if desired.
 Because regular, inner VLAN IDs are ignored by the switch for traffic in vNIC
groups, following rules and restrictions apply:
The inner VLAN tag may specify any VLAN ID in the full, supported range

(1 to 4095) and may even duplicate outer vNIC group VLAN IDs. However,
in the shared mode, inner VLAN tag and the vNIC group VLAN ID should be
the same.
Per‐VLAN IGMP snooping is not supported in vNIC groups.

The inner VLAN tag is not processed in any way in vNIC groups: The inner

tag cannot be stripped or added on port egress, is not used to restrict
multicast traffic, is not matched against ACL filters, and does not influence
Layer 3 switching.
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Chapter 16: Virtual NICs