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.
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.
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 3.6 Administration Guide.
In Oracle VM Server for SPARC, the trusted virtual network feature enables you to dynamically create virtual devices such as VNICs and VLANs on top of virtual network devices (vnets). For more information, see Using Trusted Virtual Networks in Oracle VM Server for SPARC 3.6 Administration Guide.