IBM Support

mkvdev error "Setting real adapter ent# in promiscuous mode failed with error 1"

Troubleshooting


Problem

mkvdev commands fails to recreate SEA after replacing the sysplanar.

Symptom

SEA (ent6) came up in Defined state after replacing the sysplanar.  
$ lsdev -type adapter|grep ent
ent0     Available      Logical Host Ethernet Port (lp-hea)
ent1     Available       Logical Host Ethernet Port (lp-hea)
ent2     Available       Virtual I/O Ethernet Adapter (l-lan) – PVID 998, additional VLANs 601, 220, adapter configured for bridging
ent3     Available       Virtual I/O Ethernet Adapter (l-lan) – control channel 99
ent4     Available       Virtual I/O Ethernet Adapter (l-lan) – VLAN 601
ent5     Available       EtherChannel / IEEE 802.3ad Link Aggregation – ent0 + ent1
ent6     Defined         Shared Ethernet Adapter

I removed the SEA but attempt to recreate it fails:
$ mkvdev -sea ent5 -vadapter ent2,ent4 -default ent2 -defaultid 998 -attr ha_mode=auto ctl_chan=ent3
Setting real adapter ent5 in promiscuous mode failed with error 1
Command did not complete.

Cause

SEA requirement when using Logical Host Ethernet Adapter ports (LHEA) as documented at  Shared Ethernet Adapters:
"Host Ethernet Adapter or Integrated Virtual Ethernet
A logical Host Ethernet Adapter (LHEA), which is sometimes referred to as Integrated Virtual Ethernet, is a physical adapter that you can use to configure virtual Ethernet. With Virtual I/O Server Version 1.4, or later, you can assign a logical host Ethernet port of an LHEA, as the real adapter of a Shared Ethernet Adapter. The logical host Ethernet port is associated with a physical port on the Host Ethernet Adapter. The Shared Ethernet Adapter uses the standard device driver interfaces provided by the Virtual I/O Server to communicate with the Host Ethernet Adapter.
To use a Shared Ethernet Adapter with a Host Ethernet Adapter, the following requirements must be met:
  • The logical host Ethernet port must be the only port assigned to the physical port on the Host Ethernet Adapter. No other ports of the LHEA can be assigned to the physical port on the Host Ethernet Adapter.
  • The LHEA on the Virtual I/O Server logical partition must be set to promiscuous mode. (In an Integrated Virtualization Manager environment, the mode is set to promiscuous by default.) Promiscuous mode allows the LHEA (on the Virtual I/O Server) to receive all unicast, multicast, and broadcast network traffic from the physical network."

Environment

VIOS 2.2 and 3.1 managed by an HMC.

Resolving The Problem

In this example, the physical adapter used by the SEA is an etherchannel adapter (ent5) configured on LHEA ports, ent0 and ent1.
Configure the LHEA ports (on the new sysplanar) used by the SEA to promiscuous mode on the VIOS partition.  For how-to details refer to one of the following references:
Once the LHEA port(s) have been set to promiscuous mode, retry mkvdev or if the SEA was not removed, run 'cfgdev' to make it Available.  

Document Location

Worldwide

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Document Information

Modified date:
20 October 2021

UID

ibm10957323

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