[vasco]

Hi,

I'm trying to find out if I really need a VIO in order to setup a p505 with a dual gigabit PCI card with one partition with only one ethernet port and the other with 3.

I believe that even with micro-partitioning you can't 'split' a dual-port card, and that the p505 2 motherboard Ethernets are a dual-port adapter, but I don’t want to have the VIO overhead only to do this.
A better solution would be trunking (more than 1 vlan per port) but 'they' don't let me do that here.

Any ideas?

TIA

[mshulman1980]

Unfortunately VIO is still limited at the hardware level. Given your limitations, one thing you could do is wire each port to a differnt spot and build a bunch of vadapters/seas and give your clients as many adapters as nessesay.
You're working on a 505 though.. how many lpars are you going to put onto that? If you're at 2 or less, consider ditching advanced power virtualization alltogether and going a strictly hardware route.

[cdelgadop]

Hi

I would buy more RAM and one or two HBAs (if SAN exists). Install VIO LPAR and assign all ethernet adapters in order to create an etherchannel device with increase capacity and failover. Assign all HBAs and make Virtual SCSI server adapters on them in order to assign to the client LPARs. Use micropartitioning so you can create LPARs with 10ths of CPU, this way you can, in theory, create up to 10 LPARs per CPU.

This way you can maximize your investment and use technology to create partitions for development and test enviroment on either AIX or Linux (Suse hehe) quickly.

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4079.pdf

Hope this helps

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4079.pdf

[duke900ssd]

Correct, without VIO you cannot split a dual port adapter (onboard or pci) between LPARS.

Buy another adapter fot the LPAR that needs 3 interfaces.

LPAR1 has one dualport adapter.
LPAR2 has the other dual port adapter and the new adapter.

[vasco]

Originally Posted by duke900ssd

Correct, without VIO you cannot split a dual port adapter (onboard or pci) between LPARS.

Buy another adapter fot the LPAR that needs 3 interfaces.

LPAR1 has one dualport adapter.
LPAR2 has the other dual port adapter and the new adapter.

That would be the solution IF the other PCI slot was free, but it is needed for a HBA for the partition that only needs 1 ethernet. :-(

And I can't put the 2 applications on the same LPAR (using all the resources) because the 2 "machines" must be in isolated VLANs.

Another solution would be to create 2 virtual Ethernets between the LPARs and route the traffic via the other partition but that would be a very bad thing to do from the security point of view and I don't know enough about VPNs (IP-SEC) to try to do that kind of tunnel configuration.

It would be nice if IBM had a combo adapter, 1 ethernet + 1 hba. Sun had an ethernet+SCSI board but I don't think that IBM is anything like that.

Thanks for the help.

[vasco]

Originally Posted by cdelgadop

Hi

I would buy more RAM and one or two HBAs (if SAN exists). Install VIO LPAR and assign all ethernet adapters in order to create an etherchannel device with increase capacity and failover. Assign all HBAs and make Virtual SCSI server adapters on them in order to assign to the client LPARs. Use micropartitioning so you can create LPARs with 10ths of CPU, this way you can, in theory, create up to 10 LPARs per CPU.

That's what I'm going to do.
But I'll be "wasting" 0,1 or 0,2 CPU and 512 Mb of RAM that would otherwise be used by the partitions.
I'm going to setup the VIO in the internal SCSI disks and put the 2 LPARs on SAN storage.

This way you can maximize your investment and use technology to create partitions for development and test enviroment on either AIX or Linux (Suse hehe) quickly.

I think that the VIO is a great technology and that it makes all the sense in bigger machines. But in this particular case it is not the best solution. It's the only solution and I'll have to use it but it will turn a simple task in a complex one... :-(
If this were in a PC I'd only add an USB ethernet... LOL...


Thanks for the links they'll be usefull.

[cdelgadop]

Hmm

I see your point. You can also use the Worload Manager of AIX in order to consolidate several workloads from different applications and give each of them shares of CPU and memory. The following link is an excelent howto made by the creator of nmon tool.

Setting up AIX Workload Manager in 30 minutes

About the VIOS, you will lose more than 0.2, it's recommended to assign at least 0.5 if using Shared Ethernet Adapter

Hope this helps

[vasco]

Originally Posted by cdelgadop

Hmm
I see your point. You can also use the Worload Manager of AIX in order to consolidate several workloads from different applications and give each of them shares of CPU and memory.

I know about NLM but in this case it will not help. The applications MUST be in different machines only because they are in different (and isolated) networks, one is on a DMZ, the other in an internal network.
I'll need to be extra carefull with the VIO config in order to make sure it can't be used to bypass the firewall.

The following link is an excelent howto made by the creator of nmon tool.
Setting up AIX Workload Manager in 30 minutes

Nice doc, thank you very much...

About the VIOS, you will lose more than 0.2, it's recommended to assign at least 0.5 if using Shared Ethernet Adapter

We'll see... If it was a p505-Q it would be ok, but as it is I don't think that I can spare that much.

[cdelgadop]

Hmmm

Ok, 2 LPARs, each on different networks (one of them in a DMZ). I wouldn't use VIOS to provide Shared Ethernet Adapter in this case, only to provide virtual storage. I'd buy another ethernet adapter and assign them to both LPARs. This might save you a lot of troubles and time configuring AIX as well as the DMZ to be secure with the VIOS.

Looks like VIOS is not the best approach for you. You might find usefull to buy HBAs and boot each LPAR form SAN LUNS (if exists).

Hope this helps

[vasco]

Thank you all for your help.

Last Friday I was able to show IBM that this configuration was NOT a good solution, in the end they agreed to let this 505 alone doing what it is doing now and install the other application in a new machine. :-)