IBM P5 570 manual POWER5 Partitioning, Virtual I/O Server, Shared Ethernet adapter, Virtual SCSI

POWER5 Partitioning

Network

External storage

2 CPUs

Virtual I/O

Server

Virtual	Virtual
SCSI	adapter

2 CPUs 3 CPUs 3 CPUs

Linux AIX AIX v5.2 v5.3

6CPUs

Micro-Partitioning

AIX v5.3 Linux AIX v5.3 Linux AIX v5.3

Virtual Ethernet

POWER Hypervisor

I/O		I/O		I/O		I/O
Storage	Network	Sto	Net	Sto	Net	Sto	Net

HMC	I/O
	S	N

Figure 2-15 Micro-Partitioning and LPAR

Virtual I/O Server

The Virtual I/O Server is a special-purpose partition that provides virtual I/O resources to client partitions. The Virtual I/O Server owns the real resources that are shared with the other clients. With Virtual I/O technology, a physical adapter can be assigned to a partition to be shared by one or more partitions, enabling clients to minimize their number of physical adapters. The Virtual I/O Server can be used to reduce costs by eliminating the requirement that each partition has a dedicated network adapter, disk adapter, and disk drive.

It is preferable to use the Virtual I/O server in a partition with dedicated resources to help ensure stable performance.

The following sections discuss the two major functions that are provided from the Virtual I/O Server.

Shared Ethernet adapter

A Shared Ethernet Adapter is a new service that acts as a Layer 2 network switch to route network traffic from a Virtual Ethernet to a real network adapter. The Shared Ethernet Adapter must run in a Virtual I/O Server partition.

The advantage of the Virtual Ethernet Services is that partitions to communicate outside the system without having a physical network adapter attached to the partition. Up to 18 VLANs can be shared on a single network interface. The amount of network traffic will limit the number of client partitions that are served through a single network interface.

Virtual SCSI

Access to real storage devices is implemented through the Virtual SCSI services, a part of the Virtual I/O Server partition. Logical volumes that are created and exported on the Virtual I/O Server partition will be shown at the virtual storage client partition as a SCSI disk. All current storage device types such as SAN, SCSI, and RAID are supported.

The Virtual I/O server supports logical mirroring, and RAID configurations. Logical volumes created on RAID or JBOD configurations are bootable, and the number of logical volumes is limited to the amount of storage available and architectural limits of the LVM.

40p5-570 Technical Overview and Introduction