Saturday, May 15, 2010

Shared Ethernet Adapter Redundancy

Shared Ethernet adapter: It can be used to connect a physical network to a virtual Ethernet network. Several client partitions to share one physical adapter.

Shared Ethernet Redundancy: This is for temporary failure of communication with external networks. Approaches to achieve continuous availability:

  • Shared Ethernet adapter failover
  • Network interface backup

Shared Ethernet adapter failover: It offers Ethernet redundancy. In a SEA failover configuration 2 VIO servers have the bridging functionality of the SEA. They use a control channel to determine which of them is supplying the Ethernet service to the client. The client partition gets one virtual Ethernet adapter bridged by 2 VIO servers.

Requirements for configuring SEA failover:

  • One SEA on one VIOs acts as the primary adapter and the second SEA on the second VIOs acts as a backup adapter.
  • Each SEA must have at least one virtual Ethernet adapter with the “access external network flag(trunk flag) checked. This enables the SEA to provide bridging functionality between the 2 VIO servers.
  • This adapter on both the SEA’s has the same pvid
  • Priority value defines which of the 2 SEA’s will be the primary and which is the secondary. An adapter with priority 1 will have the highest priority.

Procedure for configuring SEA failover:

  • Configure a virtual Ethernet adapter via DLPAR. (ent2)
    • Select the VIOàClick task buttonàchoose DLPARàvirtual adapters
    • Click actionsàCreateàEthernet adapter
    • Enter Slot number for the virtual Ethernet adapter into adapter ID
    • Enter the Port virtual Lan ID(PVID). The PVID allows the virtual Ethernet adapter to communicate with other virtual Ethernet adapters that have the same PVID.
    • Select IEEE 802.1
    • Check the box “access external network”
    • Give the virtual adapter a low trunk priority
    • Click OK.
  • Create another virtual adapter to be used as a control channel on VIOS1.( give another VLAN ID, do not check the box “access external network” (ent3)
  • Create SEA on VIO1 with failover attribute. ( mkvdev –sea ent0 –vadapter ent2 –default ent2 –defaultid 1 –attr ha_mode=auto ctl_chan=ent3. Ex: ent4
  • Create VLAN Ethernet adapter on the SEA to communicate to the external VLAN tagged network ( mkvdev –vlan ent4 –tagid 222) Ex:ent5
  • Assign an IP address to SEA VLAN adapter on VIOS1. using mktcpip
  • Same steps to VIO2 also. ( give the higher trunk priority:2)

No comments:

Post a Comment