Scenario: Creating a virtual Ethernet for interpartition communications

 

As a system administrator of a small company, you use a system that is divided into four logical partitions. You need to allow communication between all four logical partitions. Because money and space is limited in your IT department, you want to avoid purchasing excess Ethernet cards and cables.

 

Situation

Your hardware has a limited number of card slots available for local area network (LAN) cards. Therefore, find a solution that does not require additional LAN cards.

 

Objectives

As the system administrator for this company, you have the following objectives:

 

Details

This figure shows a virtual Ethernet that enables communication among four logical partitions and uses proxy ARP to allow the data to flow between the virtual Ethernet and the external LAN.

 

Prerequisites and assumptions

Setup requirements are as follows:

If you use IBM System i5 products, the concept of a primary logical partition is not applicable. In addition, the steps to enable the logical partitions to participate in a virtual Ethernet are performed from a Hardware Management Console (HMC).

 

Parent topic:

Network scenarios