You can configure attributes such as Sharing, Teaming, and Peer-Forwarding on shareable NICs (SR_IOV NICs). These attributes can be briefly defined as follows:
Sharing: A single physical port can be enabled with multiple logical ports which can then be assigned to or shared between Partition Images. Only the SR-IOV capable ports can be shared. (By default 1Gbe and 10Gbe NIC cards supported in ClearPath Forward Platforms have this capability).
Teaming: Enabling Teaming on Physical port allows the logical ports within or across physical ports to be teamed using the OS capabilities within the OS. Enabling teaming policy on a physical port sets the following attributes on the logical ports:
MACASSIGN: Assigning changing MAC value.
MACSPOOF: Sending packets with arbitrary source MAC values.
PROMISCOUS: Receiving non broadcast packets from the Shared NIC port from anywhere, indiscriminately.
All three attributes are enabled/disabled when Teaming is enabled/disabled.
Peer-Forwarding: This is used when partition images on the same platform should be able to communicate via a shared NIC port.
Settings done on the physical port are inherited by the logical ports. The Teaming and Peer-forwarding attributes can then be altered on the logical ports, while commissioning or resizing a partition image. Conversely, you can enable/disable Teaming/Peer-Forwarding on the logical ports only if they were enabled on the physical port.
Notes:
These options are available only on the PEPP platforms with spar version 4.3.
To enable NIC Sharing, s-Par must be in running state.
When you enable or disable NIC Sharing, you get an option to restart the platform immediately or later. If you choose to restart later, the ports to which the settings were applied remain unusable till you restart it. |
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