In Oracle Solaris, VNICs and etherstubs are the basic components of a virtual network. This section describes the steps to configure these components in preparation for building the virtual network. For a description of these components, see Network Virtualization Components.
You can configure the following components:
Configure VNICs and etherstubs. For more information, see How to Configure VNICs and Etherstubs.
Configure VNICs with VLAN IDs to host VLAN traffic. For more information, see How to Configure VNICs as VLANs.
Configure VNICs with primary VLAN IDs and secondary VLAN IDs of private VLANs (PVLANs) to host PVLAN traffic. For more information, see How to Configure VNICs as PVLANs.
Configure IPoIB VNICs. For more information, see How to Configure IPoIB VNICs.
Configure properties for a VNIC, such as MAC addresses and CPUs to be associated with the VNIC.
When configuring VNICs, note the following:
Certain property modifications work only with VNICs. For example, with the dladm create-vnic command, you can configure a MAC address as well as assign a VLAN ID to create a VNIC as a VLAN. However, you cannot configure a MAC address directly for a VLAN by using the dladm create-vlan command.
You can create only one VNIC at a time over a datalink. Like datalinks, VNICs have link properties that you can further configure as needed. For information about the different types of link properties, see Network Resource Management by Using Datalink Properties.
A virtual network device in a Oracle VM Server for SPARC can support multiple Oracle Solaris 11 VNICs. The virtual network device must be configured to support multiple MAC addresses, one for each VNIC that the virtual network device supports. Oracle Solaris zones in the logical domain connect to the VNICs. For more information, see Using Virtual NICs on Virtual Networks in Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.3 Administration Guide.