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).

  1. Enabling the logical partitions to participate in a virtual Ethernet
    Use this procedure to enable virtual Ethernet.
  2. Creating the Ethernet line descriptions
    Use this procedure to configure new Ethernet line descriptions to support virtual Ethernet.
  3. Turning on IP datagram forwarding
    You need to turn on IP datagram forwarding on the partition that connects the virtual Ethernet to the external LAN. IP datagram forwarding enables the IP packets to be forwarded among different subnets.
  4. Creating the interface to enable proxy ARP
    Before you create the TCP/IP interfaces, you need to decide how you want to connect your virtual Ethernet to a physical local area network (LAN). To allow your logical partitions to communicate with systems on an external LAN, you need to enable the TCP/IP traffic to travel between the virtual Ethernet and the external LAN.
  5. Creating the virtual Ethernet interface on partition A
    Use this procedure to create the virtual Ethernet interface on partition A.
  6. Creating the virtual Ethernet interface on partition B
    Use this procedure to create the virtual Ethernet interface on partition B.
  7. Creating the virtual Ethernet interface on partition C
    Use this procedure to create the virtual Ethernet interface on partition C.
  8. Creating the virtual Ethernet interface on partition D
    Use this procedure to create the virtual Ethernet interface on partition D.
  9. Creating the routes
    Use this procedure to create the default routers to enable the packets to exit the virtual Ethernet.
  10. Verifying network communications
    Use the ping command to verify your network communications.

 

Parent topic:

Network scenarios
Related reference
Logical partitions
Related information
Virtual Ethernet for i5/OS logical partitions