Users Guide

4–Switch Independent Partitioning
Switch Independent Partitioning Configuration
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Virtual machine (VM)-to-VM Ethernet traffic between VMs on different vSwitches
is routed by the eSwitch if the communicating VMs are attached to NIC partitions
derived from the same physical port. The eSwitch handles VM-to-VM
communication by learning MAC addresses of the virtual NICs (VNICs) of the
VMs. This capability enables the eSwitch to switch packets destined to another
VM on the same host.
The adapter supports a maximum of 64 Layer-2 MAC address filters across all
partitions. The NIC driver evenly distributes the number of filters across all NIC
partitions. For example, if the NIC adapter has four NIC partitions, two NIC
partitions per physical port, each NIC partition gets 16 filters (64/4 = 16).
The available number of MAC address filters per partition determines the number
of VMs that can communicate to other VMs through the eSwitch without the
eSwitch having to forward the traffic to an external switch.
The VLAN and teaming solutions on partitioned NIC functions have the following
restrictions:
 A fail-safe team cannot be created using NIC functions that belong to the
same physical port. For example, you cannot choose PF2 as a backup for
PF0 because both functions are partitions of the same physical port.
 802.3ad link aggregation teams are not allowed on partitioned NIC
functions.
NOTE
For most deployments, this limit of 64 Layer-2 MAC address filters is not
reached and is only applicable when a large number of VMs need to
communicate with other VMs on the same host with the eSwitch.