VIOS partition and system redundancy

With a redundant VIOS partition setup, you can perform system maintenance on one VIOS partition without affecting the logical partitions. System maintenance might include rebooting, updating, upgrading, or reinstalling a VIOS partition.

On a VIOS partition level, redundancy can be added by introducing additional physical adapters. For networks, combining additional Ethernet adapters with 802.3ad Link Aggregation provides redundancy and throughput. For storage, using multiple Fibre Channel adapters with Multipath I/O (MPIO) or supported MPIO device drivers provides the necessary redundancy, throughput, and load balancing.

Redundancy can be applied to a system that spans multiple I/O drawers and multiple servers. If you have a system that spans multiple I/O drawers and servers, allocate the adapters from different I/O drawers or servers to a VIOS partition for a highly redundant setup.