Sharing Ethernet from a Virtual IO server

[trifo]

Hi!

A would need to create a virtual ethernet adapter to one of my LPAR-s, as we ran out of physical adapters. I have a VIO server in the same managed system, which was used to serve as disk backent to a bunch of LPAR-s. Here comes the part where I got confused:

There is only one Ethernet adapter card (dual port) allocated in the VIO server to provide network access to it. Is is possible to use THAT adapter to create a shared ethernet adapter and ue it from both the VIO itself and from the LPAR-s as well?

Some salt to the story: this is a little bunch of LPAR-s, working together. We have two IP networks on them for the outside communication and one for the inside communication. Say, outside network for the service IP-s an the inside network for the internal IP-s (GPFS filesystems and so on). Now, the VIO resides in "outside network 1" and the LPAR sould be part of "outside network 2". These are VLANs defined in the network infrastructure.

Now the VIO-s dual port card is in use, both port is configured to access the network - "outside network 1" and "inside network"
The LPAR mentioned ha no any network device.

The goal would be that both the VIO and the LPAR be able to access their designated networks through that only one physical adapter card.

My questions are:
- is this possible at all?
- is this possible without shutting down the VIO?

I tried to add virtual ethernet adapters to the VIO server, but I did not succeed during runtime.

Version info: LPAR - AiX6.1
HMC V7 R3.4.0
VIO 1.3.0.1-FP-8.1

I hope your answers help me out.

--Trifo

 

[AIXLogician]

Hello there,
Before we discuss the options, I strongly recommend you upgrade your VIO ios and HMC version, Dude seriously you are lagging far behind.

What is the hardware?

Now let me tell you this, you can have upto 20 different VLANs on a single physical ethernet port. Ex: on same physical port you can use IP addresses like 10.10.2.x, 10.10.3.x, 10.12.3.x, etc. etc..,

There are certain requirements for that (compatibility)
1. IBM Hardware & Software
2. Network Switch

If I am reading you right, you are not doing SEA, first configure SEA, since there is no SEA, you can add multiple VLANS to your virtual adapters.

Since you have two ports on each VIOS, you can etherchannel them to increase the bandwidth. It will be robust and dual redundant.

If you already have an SEA following are the three scenarios

1. You have to bring down both VIOS and add the new VLAN to their profiles (this requires a complete halt of the manage system) Not friendly - Only good for a newly build system.

2. Create a new virtual adapter on both VIOS, this new virtual adapter should have the same trunk priority as your existing virtual adapter you are using for SEA. (ex: you have initially created two virtual adapters 1st virtual adapter (where you define the trunk priority and click to access external network) and 2nd virtual adapter is the control channel adapter (you Don't select any thing on this, you just assign an Adapter ID), considering you have created virtual and control channel adapters as ent0 and ent1,your SEA adapter will be ent2, now you will create another virtual adapter ent3, you can add multiple VLANS to it up to 20). select the same priority as your ent0. Once you have done that on both VIOS, you will now manually add the new virtual adapter (ent3) to your SEA (ent2)
chdev -l SEA -a vrit_adapters=existing_virtAdapt,new_virtAdapt
Ex: chdev -l ent2 -a virt_adapters=ent0,ent3

Do the above on both VIOS, after running the above command, do a failover and fallback of SEA.
Run the below commands from the primary VIOS
# entstat -d SEA_Adapt | grep -i state --> to list its current state as primary or secondary (where sea_Adapt=ent2 in your case)
# chdev -l sea_Adapt -a ha_mode=standby --> to failover
# entstat -d SEA_Adapt | grep -i state --> to check the state again
# chdev -l sea_Adapt -a ha_mode=auto --> to fall back

Now in the HMC create a new virtual adapter for client and give the new VLAN you added to it, assign teh proper IP, subnet mask and gateway, you should be up nad running.

3. You can do it dynamically with any downtime, but this comes with a cost.
a. Power7 is the requirement, no exceptions
b. VIOS should be atleast 2.2 fp.10 or 24 (i am not sure)
c. HMC should be at v7.7X
d. System Firmware should be atleast AM6XX (if you are using 770, it could be different if you use 740)


To answer your question, yes you can have multiple different VLANs on a single physical port. Yes it is possible when you use case no 2.

 

[trifo]

Thank you for your quick reply! The systems mentioned are P6 p590 systems, thus I will not be able to avoid downtime. OK, a will arrange that.

 

[trifo]

Finally I was able to create the shared ethernet adapter on the VIO server and also I was able to configure it to the needed IP parameters. Now the VIO can communicate well with the world through the SEA. Now I am confused about the next step. I created a pair of virtual adapters for my client as well, gave them VLAN ID-s similar to the ones on the VIO (1 for the first and 2 for the second). Activated the client LPAR, 2 new virtual eth adapter appeared in order, but they are unable to communicate with the world or even the VIO server. What is the method to bind the client virtual adapter to the SEA? Should I do it using the mkvdev command on the VIO?

--Trifo

 

[AIXLogician]

You created two adapters on client? Why would you do that? (unless you want to configure multiple different IPs, which I don't see the case here.)
My friend, do this,
On the client, you will only created one virtual adapter (if no VLAN Tagging, meaning you don't want to have multiple different IPs on client.)
When you create a virtual adapter, you will do two things,
1. Adapter ID, this can be random or in a order depending how your env is.
2. Port Virtual Ethernet, this is the main part, here you will give the PVID of your SEA
(default id X, where X= the ID you give while defining the SEA, which might be your virtual adapter ID of primary adapter on VIO). If you are not 100% sure, look at the IP of any VIO and you ask the Network team what is the tag ID for this subnet. They should be able to tell you.

Also make sure, you enter the right information, like IP address, subnet mask value and Default gateway, do a ping test.

Again, no need to create two adapters on client one adapter with right PVID should do it.

 

[trifo]

Thanks again for the quick reply! Well, indeed, I need to configure two different IP address for two different networks. That's why I have set up two adapters. One is for communication with the "world" and one is for internal communication, like GPFS filesystems, database interconnects, and so on. This network is not routed.

 

[trifo]

This is what I have done so far:

I have ONE dual port Eth adapter and TWO hosts (a VIO and an AIX LPAR)
I need to connect the BOTH to TWO different IP networks:
For the VIO:
Outside IP: 20.30.5.159 (/26 network)
Inside IP: 192.168.8.159 (/25 network)
For the AIX LPAR:
Outside network: 20.30.5.214 (/26 network, NOT the same as for the VIO)
Inside IP: 192.168.8.214 (/25 network, the same as for the VIO)

On the VIO I had ent0 and ent1 as physical adapters and I have created ent2 and ent3 as virtual adapters from the HMC.
Then I have created 2 SEA adapters, as follows:

$ mkvdev -sea ent0 -vadapter ent2 -default ent2 -defaultid 1
$ mkvdev -sea ent1 -vadapter ent3 -default ent3 -defaultid 2

then 2 more ethernet adapters were created:
ent4 Available Shared Ethernet Adapter
ent5 Available Shared Ethernet Adapter

The I configured IP to these adapters:
$ mktcpip -hostname vio-d -inetaddr 20.30.5.159 -interface en5 -netmask 255.255.255.192 -gateway 20.30.5.129

$ chdev -dev en4 -attr netaddr=192.168.8.159
$ chdev -dev en4 -attr netmask=255.255.255.128
$ chdev -dev en4 -attr state=up

Then I have created 2 new virtual ethernet adapters on the client. I think I missed something about the VLAN ID-s. Also on the switch config, the outside IP addresses of the VIO and the client are not in the same VLAN.

 

[AIXLogician]

Alright,
Then you need to have that defined at network side, and I assume that is already done.
Considering that you are using two IP's (one public and other private), the VLAN for Public IP has to be defined.
Say your public IP is 10.10.4.xxx, its tag vlan id '4', then for your virtual adapter you need to define this vlan id, in order for it to communicate to outer world, for private IP you don't need to show the world "we exist", so basically we define a Class B IPs for private network (say 100.100.xxx.xxx), or any class your env is using currently, but remember the private IP wont respond to any other IP, it will only talk to IPs on its subnet, no DNS entry. Either you can ask them (network team) or choose any vlan for private communication. (depending on yur env).

Remember to enter the correct vlan ID and double check for subnet and default gateway.