Partitioning enforces isolation of the fabric. The default partition is created on all managed devices. Devices that are running an SM, all switches, routers, and gateways are added to the default partition with full membership. By default, all the HCA ports are also added to the default partition with FULL membership.
Partitioning is provisioned to the Subnet Manager via the partitions.conf configuration file, which cannot be removed or manually modified.
For those who use NVIDIA gateway systems, for proper system functionality, disable the automatic partitioning by changing the attribute gateway_port_partitioning = none in the /opt/ufm/files/conf/gv.cfg configuration. Restart UFM for the change to take effect.
If required, you can add an extension to the partitions.conf file that is generated by UFM. You can edit the file, /opt/ufm/files/conf/partitions.conf.user_ext, and the content of this extension file will be added to the partitions.conf file. Files synchronization is done by UFM on every logical model change. However, it can also be triggered manually by running the /opt/ufm/scripts/sync_partitions_conf.sh script. The script validates and merges the /opt/ufm/files/conf/partitions.conf.user_ext file into the /opt/ufm/files/conf/opensm/partitions.conf file and starts the heavy sweep on the Subnet Manager.
The maximum length of the line in the partitions.conf file is 4096 characters. However, to enable long PKeys, it is possible to split the pkey membership to multiple lines:
IOPartition=0x4, ipoib, sl=0, defmember=full : <port-guid1> , <port-guid2> ;
IOPartition=0x4, ipoib, sl=0, defmember=full : <port-guid3> , <port-guid4> ;
The partitions.conf.user_ext uses the same format as the partitions.conf file. See SM Partitions.conf File Format for the format of the partitions.conf file.
For example, to add server ports to PKey 4:
IOPartition=0x4, ipoib, sl=0, defmember=full : 0x8f10001072a41;