Chapter 3. Virtualization 83
Draft Document for Review September 2, 2008 5:05 pm 4405ch03 Virtualization.fm
Figure 3-3 Architectural view of a Shared Ethernet Adapter
A single SEA setup can have up to 16 Virtual Ethernet trunk adapters and each virtual
Ethernet trunk adapter can support up to 20 VLAN networks. Therefore, it is possible for a
single physical Ethernet to be shared between 320 internal VLAN. The number of shared
Ethernet adapters that can be set up in a Virtual I/O server partition is limited only by the
resource availability as there are no configuration limits.
Unicast, broadcast, and multicast is supported, so protocols that rely on broadcast or
multicast, such as Address Resolution Protocol (ARP), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
(DHCP), Boot Protocol (BOOTP), and Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP) can work across
an SEA.
For a more detailed discussion about virtual networking, see:
http://www.ibm.com/servers/aix/whitepapers/aix_vn.pdf
Note: A Shared Ethernet Adapter does not need to have an IP address configured to be
able to perform the Ethernet bridging functionality. It is very convenient to configure IP on
the Virtual I/O Server. This is because the Virtual I/O Server can then be reached by
TCP/IP, for example, to perform dynamic LPAR operations or to enable remote login. This
can be done either by configuring an IP address directly on the SEA device, or on an
additional virtual Ethernet adapter in the Virtual I/O Server. This leaves the SEA without
the IP address, allowing for maintenance on the SEA without losing IP connectivity in case
SEA failover is configured.
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