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 > Why VLAN and NPAR management matters
As network architects take advantage of virtualization capabilities to build these complex networks, VLANs proliferate. More VLANs can, of course, turn into a problem, because they represent more network features to manage. Thus, the careful management of VLANs is key to network success.
Many datacenters use vSphere® deployments, and many are in converged architectures, running multiple types of networking services over a single physical medium (e.g., NIC, cable, switch). In vSphere, you can assign VLANs in the VM’s guest OS, on a vSwitch, or at the physical switch (fabric level), either in the chassis or external to it. VLANs you create at the fabric level bring some advantages, because network administrators can manage the network with consistency, and special-purpose network hardware is historically faster than software switches. Because of the complexity of networking in regard to service and application design, and the converged networking configuration of many vSphere deployments, a well-designed hardware and VLAN management solution is critical.
Coupled with VLAN management, the use of NPAR can be a powerful asset as well, giving an administrator the ability to partition a NIC into multiple NICs that appear separately to the OS. However, with NPAR, administrators have been historically constrained to a single VLAN assignment on the entirety of the physical port. Put differently, if an administrator used NPAR to partition a single physical NIC into four independent devices to present to the OS, all VLAN assignments made at the switch would be applied identically across all partitions on that NIC port. With Advanced NPAR, however, the switch is made aware of the configuration and the NPAR configuration is both server side and switch side. This allows administrators to configure differing VLANs across multiple NPARs on a single NIC.