Configuring two different networks using virtual I/O Server (VIOS)

When we talk about production environments, each administrator should consider all possible single points of failure (SPOF) and resilience in the schema. Here, we will explore the VIOS and LPAR networks, which eliminates the most likely SPOF of the network, providing a separate network that can quickly communicate with the backup server to access applications and databases.

This architecture has been widely used, where users can access the server 24x7, and administrators can back up data without affecting user bandwidth.

Figure 1. Schema diagram

In this architecture, 11545.html "> We have two VIOS instances, each VIOS has two separate host Ethernet adapters dedicated to each VIOS in promiscuous mode. Each HEA incorporates a shared Ethernet Adapter.

Each VIOS two Ethernet adapters are connected to different networks (public and private), and each LPAR will have a minimum of two virtual Ethernet with different virtual LAN (VLAN) IDs.

To better understand, we decompose the configuration into two steps.

Step 1th: Create a VIOS partition/vios partition configuration

On VIOS, we need to create 4 virtual Ethernet ports. You need to make sure that the physical HEA is in promiscuous mode.

After you create all Ethernet, you can see 4 ethernet on each VIOS instance.

Figure 2: Ethernet Adapter

Use the following configuration to set up all 4 virtual Ethernet.

Figure 3: Ethernet Adapter-1
Port Virtual Ethernet (VLAN ID 1) Priority 1

Figure 4: Ethernet Adapter-2