Nic Partitioning And Bandwidth Management; Overview; Supported Operating Systems For Nic Partitioning - Qlogic FastLinQ 3400 Series User Manual

10
NIC Partitioning and
Bandwidth Management
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Overview

NIC partitioning divides a QLogic 8400/3400 Series 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. This Switch Independent
Partitioning is also known as vNIC2 or Virtual NIC2 by IBM.
The number 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:
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Supported Operating Systems for NIC Partitioning

The QLogic 8400/3400 Series 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters support NIC
partitioning on the following operating systems:
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Overview
Configuring for NIC Partitioning
Configuration Parameters
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.
Windows Server 2008 family
Windows Server 2012 family
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