[jc8819]

Hi,

I am new to the forum. Hoping someone can help....

My company is implementing an ERP using P550's with Oracle 10g and 11i applications.

We have 2 550's, one for test/dev and one for prod. We are using VIO on the test/dev and want to put VIO on the Prod box as well. Both systems have 2 dual core 2.1 Ghz procs and 32 Gb of Ram.

Recently the subject of using Etherchannel to bond 2 x 1 Gb links into a 2Gb channel came up. I have noticed a few posts in this section talking about this but no one seems to say that yes you can do it with VIO. Is it possible to have a true bonding if two links or can you just do a active/passive with vio? The switch will be a Cisco 6509 that the P550 channels to. The channel will be to retrieve data from a NFS mounted Netapp 3020 Lun.

Can anyone help?

Jc

[rydekull]

As always, I leave no guarantees.

In theory I believe you can just create a etherchannel device that uses those two devices at the same time. Then you share that device as a SEA-adapter.

But really, 1Gbps isnt enough for you? Isnt it better if you'd have a redundant path if one of the interfaces were to fail. Just a thought.

[cdelgadop]

Hi

Yes, you can use Etherchannel with VIOS, in fact there's a command that creates a device as Link Agregation that is Etherchannel and then this device is asociated to a Virtual Adapter (that has the trunking enabled) and the create a SEA device.

Following the SEA device config in my VIOS:

padmin@bmvios01 /home/padmin >lsdev | grep ent
ent0 Available 2-Port 10/100/1000 Base-TX PCI-X Adapter (1410890
ent1 Available 2-Port 10/100/1000 Base-TX PCI-X Adapter (1410890
ent2 Available Virtual I/O Ethernet Adapter (l-lan)
ent3 Available EtherChannel / IEEE 802.3ad Link Aggregation
ent4 Available Shared Ethernet Adapter
ent5 Available 2-Port 10/100/1000 Base-TX PCI-X Adapter (1410890
ent6 Available 2-Port 10/100/1000 Base-TX PCI-X Adapter (1410890
ent7 Available VLAN
padmin@bmvios01 /home/padmin >lsdev -dev ent4 -vpd
padmin@bmvios01 /home/padmin >lsdev -dev ent4
name status description
ent4 Available Shared Ethernet Adapter
padmin@bmvios01 /home/padmin >lsdev -dev ent3 -vpd
padmin@bmvios01 /home/padmin >r oem
oem_setup_env
padmin@bmvios01 /home/padmin >
padmin@bmvios01 /home/padmin >
padmin@bmvios01 /home/padmin >lsattr -El ent4
ctl_chan Control Channel adapter for SEA failover True
ha_mode disabled High Availability Mode True
largesend 0 Enable Hardware Transmit TCP Resegmentation True
netaddr 0 Address to ping True
pvid 51 PVID to use for the SEA device True
pvid_adapter ent2 Default virtual adapter to use for non-VLAN-tagged packets True
real_adapter ent3 Physical adapter associated with the SEA True
thread 1 Thread mode enabled (1) or disabled (0) True
virt_adapters ent2 List of virtual adapters associated with the SEA (comma separated) True
padmin@bmvios01 /home/padmin >
padmin@bmvios01 /home/padmin >lsattr -El ent3
adapter_names ent0,ent1 EtherChannel Adapters True
alt_addr 0x000000000000 Alternate EtherChannel Address True
auto_recovery yes Enable automatic recovery after failover True
backup_adapter NONE Adapter used when whole channel fails True
hash_mode default Determines how outgoing adapter is chosen True
mode standard EtherChannel mode of operation True
netaddr 0 Address to ping True
noloss_failover yes Enable lossless failover after ping failure True
num_retries 3 Times to retry ping before failing True
retry_time 1 Wait time (in seconds) between pings True
use_alt_addr no Enable Alternate EtherChannel Address True
use_jumbo_frame no Enable Gigabit Ethernet Jumbo Frames True
padmin@bmvios01 /home/padmin >k
ksh: ^[kk: not found.
padmin@bmvios01 /home/padmin >
padmin@bmvios01 /home/padmin >lsattr -El ent2
alt_addr 0x000000000000 Alternate Ethernet Address True
chksum_offload yes Checksum Offload Enable True
copy_buffs 32 Transmit Copy Buffers True
copy_bytes 65536 Transmit Copy Buffer Size True
max_buf_huge 64 Maximum Huge Buffers True
max_buf_large 64 Maximum Large Buffers True
max_buf_medium 256 Maximum Medium Buffers True
max_buf_small 2048 Maximum Small Buffers True
max_buf_tiny 2048 Maximum Tiny Buffers True
min_buf_huge 24 Minimum Huge Buffers True
min_buf_large 24 Minimum Large Buffers True
min_buf_medium 128 Minimum Medium Buffers True
min_buf_small 512 Minimum Small Buffers True
min_buf_tiny 512 Minimum Tiny Buffers True
trace_debug no Trace Debug Enable True
use_alt_addr no Enable Alternate Ethernet Address True


As you can see i have a single card with two ethernet ports (this is a Point of Failure in my configuration) that are aggregated on one Etherchannel device (ent3) that is linked to the ent2 (Virtual Ethernet adapter), and this one is configured as a SEA adapter backed by a physical device (ent3) that turns to be an etherchannel.

Using Etherchannel in Oracle configs is a good idea cause networks are protected from HW failures in the NICs and performance can be improved by using two or more pipes of communications. Very Important: at Ethernet Switches level you need to enabled the etherchannel ports or groups, ask your netadmin to config those ports with a fixed speed and duplex feature.

Now, my question is: why do you want to create a VIOS in your production system?

Thanks in advanced

[jc8819]

Thanks for the great reply. We do not neccesarily have to. One of the engineers working on the project thinks it is a good idea for Disk Util and space more than anything. Should we not use VIO in prod ? If so could we still use it in test/dev without a compromise on the test/dev environ since it does not directly mirror prod any longer?

thanks again...


jc

[duke900ssd]

cd3lgad0p,
Surely the question is "why wouldn't you want to virtualise a p5 system?"
You are obviously using VIO.
You can offload all the tcp / udp comms internal to the system on to the hypervisor virtual ethernets, you can share those huge disks amongst several virtual root vg's or data vg's, even dual vio servers will only cost about 0.6 of a cpu and they will give you redundancy for every LPAR even if you only have two of each device, like disks and ethernet adapters.

[cdelgadop]

Hi

Please wait. Virtualization and consolidation of workloads is as good idea as it was distributed systems years ago. Then, suddenly some people realizes that ideas from the mainframe arena wasn't that bad at all, right ?

So, why don't ask if virtualization is good for everything ??, i don't think so. I think that a production system like SAP-ERP should not been on VIOS devices if good performance is needed cause there's an extra layer of communications between clients and VIOS backend devices. About ethernet communications it's true that hypervisor adapters are better than physical ones but there's also a CPU and memory extra consume you need to take in account.

You can use VIOS for your production enviroment in SAP-ERP, in fact there
are some good samples in service.sap.com. You can boot your SAP LPARs from VIOS provided disks, you can have virtual ethernet adapters for communications between DES, QA and PROD enviroments (transport system), you can use virtual disks backed by any storage subsystem for your database files and even can use optical virtual devices backed by a single DVD device. Indeed virtualization is great!, as great as Client-Server was years ago right ??. So, i would be carefull about applying virtualization to everything.

Hope this helps