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 > The benefits of using SmartFabric mode
Enabling SmartFabric mode for Dell PowerEdge MX solutions simplifies administrator tasks for networking configuration, monitoring, and management by providing a unified console for easy switch configuration. Rather than having to individually manage physical switches in each chassis, administrators can use Dell OME-M to manage everything. This includes tagging ports and servers with specific VLANs.
By unifying these tasks and giving administrators the ability to complete them from a single console, SmartFabric mode saves administrators from typing many commands in the CLI or developing complex scripted solutions, saving significant effort and reducing the chance of errors in switch configuration. Some of the commands that administrators may run without SmartFabric include ones that configure spanning tree, VLANs, mtu, switchport mode, negotiation, duplex, port channel, and partitioning at both the individual port and global levels.
Dell offers SmartFabric Services (SFS) technology to complete this underlying network automation/ orchestration, which streamlines these administrator tasks. Dell defines SmartFabric as “a logical entity that consists of a collection of physical resources, such as servers and switches, and logical resources such as networks, templates, and uplinks. The OpenManage Enterprise-Modular console provides a method to manage these resources as a single unit.”[7]