network connectivity to P750 dual VIO server

[billo102]

Hi

This is no longer an issue for us but we're eager to find out how it was a problem in the first place. Basically we have a P750 AIX server with 4 dual ethernet cards. (There's a HMC connection and 2 LHEA connections that work fine).

We assigned 2 cards to one VIO and 2 cards to the other vio (dual vio setup) and we patched one port from each of 2 ethernet cards to the network switch (this is just a test box).

Now without knowing which ports are the live ports we ran
entstat -all entx
against each of the network ports (ent2, ent3...etc)

However none of them were picking up any link speed. We then continued and created SEA on both vio's and it was at this stage that running entstat showed connectivity and we could see the link speed of the switch.

The question is, how come we couldn't see it when we just patched the ethernet cards to the switch? we were under the impression we should have.
thanks

 

[McleanWJM]

why hook lhe ports to VIO, The whole point of them is to setup links directly to the lpars and bypass VIO control of the lhe cards.