Filter
Top Products
A–NIC Partitioning (NPAR) Overview
What is NPAR?
A-2 SN0054667-00 C
What is NPAR?
NIC Partitioning (NPAR) 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 NPAR 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 as the
name NPAR indicates; it extends 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 restrictions listed in Table A-1. Both iSCSI and FCoE operate in
full hardware offload mode.
The QLogic NPAR solution is OS and switch agnostic, which means NPAR 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). It also means NPAR bandwidth allocation can only regulate TX traffic but
not RX traffic.
After you have configured the NIC partitions as desired on the adapter ports, you
must reboot the server to make the personality changes take effect.
You can modify the minimum and maximum bandwidth for each NIC partition. The
changes take effect immediately without rebooting the server. The minimum and
maximum bandwidths are specified as percentages of the link bandwidth, where:
Minimum bandwidth is the minimum bandwidth guaranteed to a partition.
Maximum bandwidth is the maximum value that a partition is permitted to
use.
QLogic Adapters that Support NPAR
The following adapters support NPAR:
3200 Series Intelligent Ethernet Adapters
8200 Series Converged Network Adapters
NIC Partitioning Options
The NPAR feature in QLogic adapters provides the ability to create multiple PCIe
physical functions for each physical 10 GbE port on the adapter. Each PCIe
function appears as an independent interface to the host operating system or
hypervisor.
When the adapter is configured as an Ethernet-only adapter, it contains eight
Ethernet functions.