Scenario: Configuring Shared Ethernet Adapter failover

Use this article to help you become familiar with typical Shared Ethernet Adapter failover scenario.

Situation

You are the system administrator responsible for planning and configuring the network in an environment with the Virtual I/O Server running. You want to provide higher network availability to the client logical partition on the system. This can be accomplished by configuring a backup Shared Ethernet Adapter in a different Virtual I/O Server partition.

Objective

The objective of this scenario is to configure primary and backup Shared Ethernet Adapters in the Virtual I/O Server logical partitions so that network connectivity in the client partitions will not be lost in the case of adapter failure.

Prerequisites and assumptions

The Hardware Management Console (HMC) was set up. For setup instructions, see Installing the HMC.
You understand the partitioning concepts as described in Concepts for Partitioning the server.
Two separate Virtual I/O Server partitions have been created and the Virtual I/O Server has been installed in each. For instructions, see Installing the Virtual I/O Server.
You understand what Shared Ethernet Adapter failover is and how it works. See Shared Ethernet Adapter failover.
You have created the remaining logical partitions that you want added to the network configuration.
EachVirtual I/O Server partition has an available physical Ethernet adapter assigned to it.
You have IP addresses for all partitions and systems that will be added to the configuration.

You cannot use the Integrated Virtualization Manager with multiple Virtual I/O Server partitions on the same server.

The following image depicts a configuration where the Shared Ethernet Adapter failover feature is set up. The client partitions H1 and H2 are accessing the physical network using the Shared Ethernet Adapters, which are the primary adapters. The virtual Ethernet adapters used in the shared Ethernet setup are configured with the same VLAN membership information (PVID, VID), but have different priorities. A dedicated virtual network forms the control channel and is required to facilitate communication between the primary and backup shared Ethernet device.

An illustration showing a typical Shared Ethernet Adapter failover configuration.

Using the preceding figure as a guide, follow these steps:

On the HMC, create the virtual Ethernet adapters following these guidelines:
- Configure the virtual adapters to be used for data as trunk adapters by selecting the trunk setting.
- Assign different prioritization values (valid values are 1-15) to each virtual adapter.
- Configure another virtual Ethernet to be used for the control channel by giving it a unique PVID value. Make sure you use the same PVID when creating this virtual Ethernet for both Virtual I/O Server partitions.
Using the Virtual I/O Server command line, run the following command to configure the Shared Ethernet Adapter. Run this command on both Virtual I/O Server partitions involved in the configuration:
```
mkvdev -sea physical_adapter -vadapter virtual_adapter -default 
virtual_adapter\
-defaultid PVID_of_virtual_adapter -attr ha_mode=auto 
ctl_chan=control_channel_adapter
```
For example, in this scenario, we ran the following command on both Virtual I/O Server partitions:
```
mkvdev -sea ent0 -vadapter ent1 -default ent1 -defaultid 60 -attr ha_mode=auto 
ctl_chan=ent2
```