An InfiniBand partition defines a group of InfiniBand nodes that are allowed to communicate with one another. You can use InfiniBand partitions to increase security by implementing network isolation on Exalogic machine's InfiniBand fabric. In addition, you can associate InfiniBand nodes with specific VLANs.
An InfiniBand node can be a member of multiple partitions. When a packet arrives at a compute node, the partition key (pkey) of the packet is matched with the Subnet Manager configuration. This validation prevents a compute node from communicating with another compute node outside its partition.
Based on your requirements, you can create additional partitions as follows:
Create a unique partition for Exalogic's private InfiniBand fabric by setting nondefault partition keys.
This scenario applies to both single rack and multiple Exalogic racks.
Create Virtual LANs (VLANs) on the client access network for EoIB configuration by specifying nondefault partition keys.
VLAN tagging for a virtual network interface (VNIC) on the EoIB network is optional.