RE: Virtual Ethernet and NFS Image Catalogs

Virtual Ethernet has some concerns in a HA environment. Let's say you go from DEV to PROD. Now you want to fail PROD over to PROD2 on another box. You would then have to change the host table entry on DEV to the new IP address. Without using virtual Ethernet you can simply change your DNS and get all things which talk to PROD in one fell swoop. If this isn't a concern then it isn't a concern.

I used to use NFS over virtual ethernet for PTF's. With i hosting i. However I am switching to virtualized optical. A recent thread on this list got me cleared up to where I can get this to work rather consistently.

I played around with NFS or virtualized optical for upgrades but I probably will not use that as virtualized optical causes issues with you are doing two guest lpars at the same time. Especially if one wants I_BASE and the other one is past that.

Can you use NFS and other lpar-to-lpar Ethernet on the same interface at the same time? IDK.

Funny thing is, the new 7.4 DB2 Mirror let me know that the ROCE cards are faster than virtual Ethernet.

-----Original Message-----
From: MIDRANGE-L <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Kevin Monceaux
Sent: Wednesday, May 8, 2019 2:39 PM
To: Midrange L <Midrange-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Virtual Ethernet and NFS Image Catalogs

Midrange Fans,

I'm finally beginning work on getting our PTFs up to date. We have one host and three guest i LPARs on a single managed system. All are running 7.2, so NFS image catalogs are probably the way to go.

I've been exploring our virtual Ethernet setup, which was set up before I got involved in such things. It looks like each LPAR has one virtual Ethernet interface. As far as I can tell, they're not being used for anything. They're not bridged to the outside world. I can ping LPAR to LPAR using the virtual addresses. There are no host table entries for the virtual addresses, and all our RDB directory entries point to physical interface addresses. Their virtual LAN identifiers are set to *NONE.

Since all our LPARs are on a single box, setting the LPARs up to use virtual Ethernet for LPAR to LPAR communications would probably be a good thing. If I set that up, can the same virtual Ethernet interfaces be used for that and NFS image catalogs, or do I need to add additional virtual Ethernet interfaces? If I need to add additional virtual Ethernet interfaces for NFS image catalogs, do they need to be on a separate subnet?