Dell QLogic Family of Adapters User Manual download pdf (Page 11)

Dell PowerEdge Select Network Adapters—The Freedom to Choose

Multiple Receive Queues

Multiple Receive Queues is a hypervisor-enabled technology that offloads the software vswitch from

sorting and forwarding the received packets to specific VMs. The NDC controller does the sorting and

forwarding of received traffic into queues that are mapped to a given VM using destination MAC

Address and VLAN ID, if applicable. This eliminates bottlenecks in the vswitch implementation,

increasing the total throughput. VMware calls this technology NetQueue, and Microsoft calls it VMQ.

Switch Independent Partitioning

Switch Independent Partitioning is also referred to as NIC Partitioning (NPAR). Switch Independent

Partitioning provides the capability to divide a 10GE NIC port into multiple PCI functions with flexible

bandwidth capacity allocation that looks to the OS and network infrastructure as separate NIC

interfaces. On the host OS side, Switch Independent Partitioning presents up to eight PCI functions

per device using standard PCI configuration space. Dell’s implementation maps four PCI functions to

a physical port on a dual-port 10GE device. Each function or partition is assigned a unique MAC

Address.

Switch Independent Partitioning enables allows you to replace multiple 1GE NICs with partitioning-

enabled 10GE NICs. This allows consolidation of multiple GE ports into fewer 10GE ports, reducing

switch port and cabling complexity while maintaining the network segmentation and isolation. In

addition, flexible-bandwidth allocation per partition allows for efficient use of the 10GE link.

A Switch Independent Partitioning enabled 10GE link supports the following server use cases:

 Server segmentation: The partitions can be on separate subnets or VLANs.

 Server high availability: The partitions support NIC teaming, including switch dependent link

failover and load balancing.

 Physical and virtual server: NIC Partitioning is supported in both native OS and hypervisor-

based OS. In a virtual server, emulated and direct assignment I/O of partitions to VMs are

supported.

Partitions are available for VM assignment (direct or emulated) and for application segmentation via

VLAN or IP subnets.

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Dell QLogic Family of Adapters User Manual Page 11