Users Guide

Table Of Contents
Doc No. BC0054508-00 Rev. R
January 21, 2021 Page 204 Copyright © 2021 Marvell
13 NIC Partitioning and
Bandwidth Management
NIC partitioning and bandwidth management covered in this chapter includes:
Overview
“Configuring for NIC Partitioning” on page 205
Overview
NIC partitioning (NPAR) divides a Marvell 57xx and 57xxx 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.
The quantity 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:
Reduced cabling and ports when used to replace many 1G NICs.
Server segmentation with separate subnets and VLANs.
High server availability with NIC failover and NIC link bandwidth
aggregation.
Server I/O virtualization with a virtual OS and monolithic OS support.
No change to the OS is required.
Switch-independent type teaming is supported.