dropdown menu

POWERVM - IVE

Integrated Virtual Ethernet Adapter

IVE is the collective name referring to a number of technologies including:
- Hardware - Host Ethernet Adapter
- Software components
- POWER Hypervisor functions


It offers:
- The Host Ethernet Adapter (HEA) is the major hardware component of the IVE.
  (HEA also includes all the logical ports and the virtual layer 2 switches and connects to the physical port.)
  (Once a logical port is assigned to LPAR, the LPAR operating system recognizes the HEA as the Logical Host Ethernet Adapter (LHEA).)
- Physical ports are also hardware components: Either two 10 Gbps Ethernet ports or four 1 Gbps ports or two 1 Gbps ports
- External network connectivity for LPARs using dedicated ports without the need of a Virtual I/O Server
- The speed and performance of the GX+ bus, faster than PCI Express

Depending on the IVE feature code installed, one or two physical ports are grouped into a port group. Any port group supports up to 16 LHEA ports. Each logical port can be assigned to any LPAR, and LPARs can have one logical port per physical port.



The major IVE concepts are defined as follows:
HEA: Host Ethernet Adapter, the key imbedded function located on the I/O controller chip.

LHEA: Logical Host Ethernet adapter, a logical representation of a physical HEA adapter. This is the parent device of an LHEA port.
    lhea0     Available       Logical Host Ethernet Adapter (l-hea)

LHEA port: Logical representation of a physical HEA port.
    ent0      Available       Logical Host Ethernet Port (lp-hea)

Port group: A Ggoup of logical ports that share one or two physical ports, depending from IVE feature code.
    Any IVE feature supports up to two port groups, and any port group supports up to 16 logical ports (LHEA port).


# lsdev -Cc adapter
ent0    Available       Logical Host Ethernet Port (lp-hea)
ent1    Available       Logical Host Ethernet Port (lp-hea)


root@vios1: / # lsslot -c slot
# Slot                    Description       Device(s)
HEA 1                     Logical I/O Slot  lhea0 ent0 ent1 ent2 ent3


root@aix14 / # entstat -d ent0 | grep Port
Logical Host Ethernet Port (l-port) Driver Properties:
Logical Port Link State: Up
Physical Port Link State: Up
Logical Host Ethernet Port (l-port) Specific Properties:
Logical Port Number: 1
Port Operational State: Up
External-Network Switch-Port Operational State: Up
External-Network-Switch (ENS) Port Speed: 1000 Mbps / 1 Gbps, Full Duplex


IVE can be used as SEA. IVE offers an internal layer 2 switch for LPAR to LPAR data traffic.
For a HEA port "promiscuous mode" can be set, which means that port is dedicated to a specific LPAR. (Then it is not possible to assign LHEA to another LPAR.)
------------------------

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

'Depending on the IVE feature code installed, one or two physical ports are grouped into a port group. Any port group supports up to 16 LHEA ports. Each logical port can be assigned to any LPAR, and LPARs can have one logical port per physical port'

Since.. there can be 'Either two 10 Gbps Ethernet ports or four 1 Gbps ports or two 1 Gbps ports', does it mean that an LDAR can have the max no. of lhea ports = 2 or 4. What happens when 2 physical ports are shared by a port group.. ?

aix said...

Yes, the max number of logical ports per LPAR can be 2 or 4. (When MCS value is set to 16 and you have FC5636 the max is 1)


The Multiple Core Scaling Value also should be looked at:
An MCS value must be defined at the port group level. According to the MCS value, the number of available logical ports changes. When the MCS is set to 1, this allows you to configure up to 16 logical ports, but when the MCS is set to 4, this allows you to configure up to 4 logical ports. (More info in redp4340 Redbook.)

Probably helps if you check the below Feature Codes and compare them on pg. 15 of redp4340.

-FC 5636 supports two physical ports, but both belong to the same port group. (1Gbps)
-FC 5639 supports four physical ports and two port groups. Each port group contains two physical ports. (1Gbps)
-FC 5637 supports two physical ports and any port belong to its port group, and each physical port belongs to one port group. (10Gbps)

friend lan said...

hi aix, i have dual port hea. i not use power VM. so can i use this dual port for unique Lpar on my system.

aix said...

Hi, you should be able to use it: "External network connectivity for LPARs using dedicated ports without the need of a Virtual I/O Server"

friend lan said...

thanks aix,
yes, i can use it for lpar without vios server.
but in this case, i have not powerVM(or vios),aix6.1 Os is installed in the system P, so can i use it to TCP/IP data transmit?

aix said...

Hi, I cannot test it at the moment, but I guess per description it is possible...you should give it a try :)

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the nice article.

http://www.vmexplore.com

Unknown said...

will you send me any videos related this topic .. thank you so much .. am confusing alot here ..

Unknown said...

for fc5636 we had only 2 port groups ???? these port groups are default are we can assign it ? what is the difference between port group and physical port ? why they are divinding into groups ?

new york halloween parade said...

very information and comprehensive article


new york halloween parade route map