Home > Networking Solutions > Modular/Blade Switches > MX-Series Modular Switches (PowerEdge MX) > White Papers > Managing VLANs from Advanced Partitioned NICs: Dell PowerEdge MX760c Servers Using Advanced NPAR > A Dell and Broadcom solution
To address these challenges, network architects need systems with as much flexibility, performance, and bandwidth from each port as possible; otherwise, physical cabling and port management becomes difficult. When you use network separation techniques such as VLANs and NPAR, it’s also vital that the management of those VLANs and NPAR configurations is as streamlined and easy to use as possible.
Dell and Broadcom provide a solution for these challenges in the Dell PowerEdge MX760c compute sled with the Broadcom 57504 Quad Port 25GbE Blade Mezzanine Card.
We tested VLAN and Advanced NPAR functionality using VMware vSphere on a new Dell PowerEdge MX Broadcom solution that let us create VLANs on NICs we partitioned with an updated Advanced NPAR feature. This approach adds more network ports to the vSphere environment, allowing more opportunity to segregate traffic, and moves some of the VLAN switching from vSphere software to the NIC’s hardware. Administrators implementing Advanced NPAR using this solution can choose between two modes: Full Switch mode, which requires traditional configuration of each switch, and SmartFabric mode, which streamlines admin tasks by unifying switch management through the OME-M console. We found that network administrators can connect services by creating VLANs either through a web-based OpenManage Enterprise console, which also provides automation capabilities, or through a direct command line interface.