Redundancy considerations

Redundancy options are available at several levels in the virtual I/O environment. Multipathing, mirroring, and RAID redundancy options exist for the Virtual I/O Server and some client logical partitions. Ethernet Link Aggregation (also called Etherchannel) is also an option for the client logical partitions, and the Virtual I/O Server provides Shared Ethernet Adapter failover. There is also support for node failover (PowerHA® SystemMirror®) for nodes that use virtual I/O resources.

This section contains information about redundancy for both the client logical partitions and the Virtual I/O Server. While these configurations help protect from the failure of one of the physical components, such as a disk or network adapter, they might cause the client logical partition to lose access to its devices if the Virtual I/O Server fails. The Virtual I/O Server can be made redundant by running a second instance of it in another logical partition. When you run two instances of the Virtual I/O Server, you can use LVM mirroring, multipath I/O, network interface backup, or multipath routing with dead gateway detection in the client logical partition to provide highly available access to virtual resources hosted in separate Virtual I/O Server logical partitions.