Scenario: VIPA – minimize outage due to adapter failure

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 LPAR mode z/VM guest

Using VIPA you can assign IP addresses that are not associated with a particular adapter. VIPA thus minimizes outage that is caused by adapter failure.

This scenario describes how to use:

  • Standard VIPA
  • Source VIPA (version 2.0.0 and later)

Standard VIPA is sufficient for applications, such as web servers, that do not open connections to other nodes. Source VIPA is used for applications that open connections to other nodes. Use Source VIPA Extensions to work with multiple VIPAs per destination in order to achieve multipath load balancing.

Note:
  1. See the information in Confirming that an IP address has been set under layer 3 concerning possible failure when you set IP addresses for OSA-Express features in QDIO mode (qeth driver).
  2. The configuration file layout for Source VIPA changed since the 1.x versions. In the 2.0.0 version a policy is included. For details, see the readme file and the man pages that are provided with the package.