A virtual NIC or VNIC maps an Ethernet connector on the Sun Network QDR InfiniBand Gateway Switch to a network interface within the compute node. A connector (0A-ETH-1 to 0A-ETH-4, and1A-ETH-1 to 1A-ETH-4) hosts a 10 GbE port. In the Exalogic machine, on each Sun Network QDR InfiniBand gateway switch, you can have a maximum of eight 10 GbE uplinks. In most scenarios, the number of 10 GbE uplinks is less than 8.
One or more VNICs can be assigned to a compute node. If more than one VNIC is assigned, they can be different connectors on the same Sun Network QDR InfiniBand Gateway Switch or on different Sun Network QDR InfiniBand Gateway Switches. The default configuration is to map one connector on each of the two switches and to bond or balance the pair for increased availability.
Note:
In Exalogic, you create VNICs in Sun Network QDR InfiniBand Gateway Switch manual mode.
On each Sun Network QDR InfiniBand Gateway Switch there can be a maximum of 1K VNICs per logical gateway. Logical gateway denotes either a single external Ethernet port or a defined group of external Ethernet ports. The 1K limit is shared by all VLANs on the logical gateway and each defined VLAN ID also consumes one of the 1K VNICs. For more information on VLANs see Set Up Virtual LANs.
To find out how many VNICs are currently defined, use the showvnics command and for VLANs, use showvlan.