5137ch03.fm
Draft Document for Review October 14, 2014 10:19 am
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IBM Power Systems E870 and E880 Technical Overview and Introduction
Because the VIOS is an operating system-based appliance server, redundancy for physical
devices that are attached to the VIOS can be provided by using capabilities such as Multipath
I/O and IEEE 802.3ad Link Aggregation.
Installation of the VIOS partition is performed from a special system backup DVD that is
provided to clients who order any PowerVM edition. This dedicated software is only for the
VIOS, and is supported only in special VIOS partitions. Three major virtual devices are
supported by the VIOS:
Shared Ethernet Adapter
Virtual SCSI
Virtual Fibre Channel adapter
The Virtual Fibre Channel adapter is used with the NPIV feature, as described in 3.4.8,
“Operating system support for PowerVM” on page 129.
Shared Ethernet Adapter
A Shared Ethernet Adapter (SEA) can be used to connect a physical Ethernet network to a
virtual Ethernet network. The Shared Ethernet Adapter provides this access by connecting
the POWER Hypervisor VLANs with the VLANs on the external switches. Because the
Shared Ethernet Adapter processes packets at Layer 2, the original MAC address and VLAN
tags of the packet are visible to other systems on the physical network. IEEE 802.1 VLAN
tagging is supported.
The Shared Ethernet Adapter also provides the ability for several client partitions to share one
physical adapter. With an SEA, you can connect internal and external VLANs by using a
physical adapter. The Shared Ethernet Adapter service can be hosted only in the VIOS, not in
a general-purpose AIX or Linux partition, and acts as a Layer 2 network bridge to securely
transport network traffic between virtual Ethernet networks (internal) and one or more
(Etherchannel) physical network adapters (external). These virtual Ethernet network adapters
are defined by the POWER Hypervisor on the VIOS.
