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 few key terms and concepts
Organizations commonly employ network designs that require multiple separate networks for normal network traffic for applications, storage, management, and virtual machine (VM) portability (for example, VMware vMotion). For many years, companies have had the ability to segment their networking traffic using VLANs and NPAR. Understanding each of these technologies—and how you can successfully pair them—is vital if you want to create the best network design for your organization. Table 1 defines a few key networking concepts and terms vital to this discussion.
Concept | Description and common use cases |
VLAN | Virtual local area network: A virtual overlay onto a physical network that allows a collection of devices to communicate as if they were on a single isolated network. VLANs can help to manage network load, because devices on one VLAN are logically separate from those on another. VLANs are logical, and thus administrators can group or define them based on function (such as storage, vMotion, management) or line of business (such as marketing, sales, HR). |
NPAR | Network partitioning: Using NPAR, an admin can present multiple NICs to an operating system (OS) from a single physical network interface card (NIC) as if each were a separate physical NIC. For example, an admin could divide a single 25Gb NIC using NPAR into say, four partitions, each of which appears as a separate physical NIC to the operating system. |
Advanced NPAR | Advanced NPAR is networking partitioning feature that logically partitions both the mezzanine card ports and the switch ports on the Dell PowerEdge MX7000 chassis, specifically the Dell MX9116n Fabric Switching Engine we used in our tests. Administrators can assign VLANs to each partition with Advanced NPAR and have the switch be made automatically aware of those VLAN assignments. In prior generations of NPAR, users could NPAR assign just a single VLAN to all partitions on the entire NIC. The Advanced NPAR feature is supported on the MX9116n Fabric Switching Engine, MX5108n switch, and the MX7116n Fabric Expander Module (FEM) when used in conjunction with the MX9116n (note we did not use a FEM in this study). The Advanced NPAR feature is supported on the Broadcom 57504 NIC and VMware ESXi 7.0.U3 and above as the server host operating system. |
Fabric | In a networking context, fabric refers to the collection of networking media and devices, such as NICs, switches, and cabling, that communicate with each other. Dell SmartFabric, which we discuss in more detail below, allows admins to manage these components from a single interface. |