Hello Dell community,
today some thoughts about NIC Partitioning.
What means NPAR?
NPAR is a technology used by Broadcom and Qlogic, which enables you to split up traffic on a Networkcard (NIC) in 4 partitions. NPAR is only working with 10GbE technology. NPAR is similar to QoS on Networklayer.
How can I split up the traffic?
You can split up the traffic in different ways. Like with QoS with UDP or TCP packet filter but you have also the option to split up in VLANs, Virtual Machine or application client. For application client your software must support multitenant.
When I split up the bandwidth is this dynamic or static?
You can have both, it is possible to set up static partitions or you can set it dynamic.
As you see in the picture, there are static bandwidths configured for iSCSI, FCoE, TOE and other protocols and dynamic for VMs. It is also possible that more than one Protocol or VM uses one Partition.
Has my switch to support NPAR?
No. Your switch has not to support, for your switch there is no different between an NPAR NIC than a normal NIC.
What about the OS, can every OS handle NPAR?
No. There is a list of supported OS, Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Hyper-V Server, RHEL, 5.5 and 6, SLES 11 SP1, VMware ESX, ESXi 4.1 and ESXi 5.0.
Why should I use NPAR?
From datacenter perspective it would reduce your cabling and maximize bandwidth.
How does this work?
Let me give you an example. For an Hyper-V cluster you need one NIC for Management, one NIC for Cluster Heartbeat, one for Livemigration, one for cluster shared volume, two iSCSI NICs and two or more NICs to attach you Company and VM Network. So in the past you had many NICs or a few NICs with many ports. With NPAR it is possible to use at least two 10GbE NICs Ports to setup the complete network environment. That reduces cabling and you don’t need big 2U sever to hold all the cards.
How to configure NPAR?
Check out the links below.
Qlogic
http://www.qlogic.com/OEMPartnerships/Dell/Documents/Converged/QME8242-k_converged_IO_Deployment_Guide.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK1OXNKynNw
Broadcom
http://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/shared-content/data-sheets/en/Documents/dell-57712-k-cndc-npar-setup-guide.pdf
For more questions and information take a look in this whitepapers and blogs.
http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/Dell-Broadcom-NPAR-White-Paper.pdf
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/9711.hyper-v-network-design-configuration-and-prioritization-guidance.aspx
http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pwcnt/en/broadcom-57712-k-faq.pdf
http://bladesmadesimple.com/2011/10/dell-network-daughter-card-ndc-and-network-partitioning-npar-explained/
Thank you for reading.
Regards
Flo
PS. For further blog post please also check my webpage.