MAC Addresses

A media access control (MAC) address is a unique identifier assigned to network devices, often referred to as the hardware or physical address. The appliance generates MAC addresses in pools of 128 to 1,048,576 elements. By default, the appliance has 1,000,000 MAC addresses.

Screen component

Description

Enable Virtual

(Edit screen)

By default, virtual addresses and identifiers are enabled so server profiles will be configured with virtual addresses and identifiers.

Type

Generated or Custom

  • Generated is assigned during appliance setup.
  • For Custom, you define the starting and ending addresses.

There can be more than one of each type of pool; multiple autogenerated and custom pools.

Enabled

If you enable one or more virtual addresses or identifiers, a newly created server profile will be able to use them. When you disable virtual addresses, server profiles can only use physical addresses and identifiers.

There must be at least one enabled pool range.

Start

Starting address in the pool. When you enable virtual addresses or identifiers, the predefined range is selected. The predefined range is large and randomly generated to prevent conflicts between profiles created in different realms.

Supported MAC addresses are locally administered Unicast type addresses. Therefore, you have to set the second hex digit to an even number (2, 6, A, or E) to remain locally unique.

Examples:
  • 5E:1B:6C:80:00:00 - 5E:1B:6C:80:0F:FF to create 4096 MAC addresses
  • 5E:1B:6C:80:00:00 - 5E:1B:6C:80:FF:FF to create 65K MAC addresses
End

Ending address in the pool

The second hexadecimal number in a MAC address custom range must be 2, 6, A, or E to remain locally unique.

Count

Total number of addresses in the pool

Allocated

Number of addresses in use

Available

Number of available addresses remaining

Remove

Click X to remove the pool of addresses and make them unavailable.

The X becomes visible when Count equals Remaining.

Add auto-generated

button

Generates a pool of 1 million identifiers. Button is available only when editing.

Add custom range

button

Generates a user-supplied pool of identifiers. Button is available only when editing.

Buttons

See Button functions for information about how buttons operate.