Each Universal Compute Platform appliance has two ICC ports and four data ports.
Access to the data interface of Universal Compute Platform is abstracted through the use of internal virtual switches where each data port has a dedicated vSwitch (four in total). All external connections to the data interface pass through one of these vSwitches.
Each vSwitch has between eight and 16 virtual functions (VFs) that let you run multiple application instances over the same data port. Each VF + vSwitch combination has a unique MAC address. For each installed application, you must allocate a VF on each data port to that instance. Additional application instances must be assigned to a different VF. For example, if you assign the default VF assignments on all ports, a 4120C with three Tunnel Concentrator instances uses VF01, VF02, and VF03 on each port to manage the three application instances.
When you run multiple application instances on an appliance, the instances share the same port and switch, but the attachment point is different at the PCI level. The installed application instances attach to the vSwitch, but the applications see those attachment points as PCI interfaces that are mapped to a VF, and bound to a physical data port.
Note
The 1130C has eight VFs for each vSwitch. All of the other supported appliances have 16 VFs per vSwitch. For example, a 2130C has 70 MAC addresses: two MACs for the ICC ports, four MACs for the data ports, plus 64 VF-related MACs.Universal Compute Platform OS Access
The Universal Compute Platform OS and management application shares access to resources with the installed applications. The Universal Compute Platform attaches to the physical function of the vSwitch, which provides more privileged access to port functions.
The installed applications have an internal hook to the Universal Compute Platform host through an internal NAT interface (10.0.2.2/24) back into the host. Application can use this connection for API REST calls to complete various tasks such as checking interfaces.
Example
The following image illustrates the network connections on an 1130C that has two application instances that use VF01 and VF02 respectively. The Universal Compute Platform OS attaches to the physical function (PF) of vSwitch 1 and vSwitch 2. The user interface callouts display how, for each data port, you can allocate one of eight VFs to that application instance.
