Need help in setting up NIM master on etherchannel environment

[pdtak]

I know that IBM's official stance is that NIM does not work on etherchannel environment, but has anyone able to get around it?
I'm working on a p5-590 LPAR system, and the NIM master and clients are all on the same frame.
Any help is appreciated.

 

[DukeSSD]

NIB etherchannel works as long as the adapter does not fail over during a NIM operation but link agregation will not work in a NIM environment because you never know which adapter the packet will come from and the client will only accept packets from a single source (master adapter) address.

If you have adapters to spare then do all the NIM serving from a single dedicated one and use a link agregation to NFS mount remote resources to the master and for admin, just make sure the client only connects to a single adapter for all resources.

HTH.

 

[khalidaaa]

If both your LPARs are AIX5.3s and both sharing are on the P5-590 then IMHO you can try creating a virtual ethernet on the client that you can define on the NIM master. In this case the NIM master will always talk to that client using the virtual ethernet defined there!

Never tried it but logically it can be done!

Regards,
Khalid

 

[khalidaaa]

Have a look at these links for more info:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/systems/index.jsp?topic=/iphat/iphatvirtualethernetaix.htm

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/p/os/aix/whitepapers/pdf/aix_vn.pdf

Regards,
Khalid

 

[DukeSSD]

Oh yeah khalidaaa, virtual ethernet is the way to go for NIM on the same managed system.

virtual etherchannel anyone?

As you can have virtual ethernet even without an APV / VIO setup you can just use the virtual ethernet for NIM and if your adapters are configured correctly the etherchannel should still get built if you are cloning.

 

[p5wizard]

Virtual ethernet on a p5 1.65GHz already gave 3Gbit/s throughput.

On faster processors p5 and p6, that will have increased (don't have the numbers here). So no need to etherchannel that I'd guess...


HTH,

p5wizard

 

[DukeSSD]

Yes indeed p5wizard, no point in etherchannel for NIM on the same MS, just add a virtual ethernet to the lpars, also handy should the LAN go down or for inter partition comms.

What would a mksysb, or a new, NIM install take over the hypervisor, about 5 minutes I would think. Even a huge LA etherchannel would only save you a matter of seconds - if it could work.

 

[p5wizard]

At that point the limiting factor will be the disks of the LPARs - possibly VIOS-served SAN LUNs so yes: a couple of minutes to (re)install AIX if your SAN server is running smoothly (fast disks, big cache).


HTH,

p5wizard