Ethernet Bridging

Has anyone worked much with 'Ethernet Bridging Between IBM i Host and IBM i Guest'? We are working on adding a 2nd LPAR to a production machine and I thought it would be a good idea to just one an Ethernet port on the first machine and bridge traffic from it to the new LPAR. After doing some research on the subject, I found this document: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=nas8N1011193 it explains what needs to be done very well but comes with one caveat:

Important Note: IBM suggests that the selected Ethernet resources be used for only layer-2 bridging and not for IBM i TCP/IP configuration. There is a significant increase in processor usage for any host traffic that uses bridged resources. In addition, any line description that is used for bridging receives many frames that are not useful to the TCP/IP stack. These frames use unnecessary processing resources. The virtual Ethernet line on the host does not require an interface. You only need the physical and virtual lines active for the bridge function to work. You should not have an interface on the physical line used for the bridge either. Create a separate physical line & interface for network traffic on the Host.

If I'm reading this correctly it seems IBM is implying that the bridging function is too much overhead to both service the host partition with IP traffic and bridge traffic from LPAR#2 also. So by my math that makes this facility pretty useless until you get to 3 or more LPARs. Is anyone doing this now, and can verify that is it or is not too much overhead? Why oh why did they discontinue HEA?

Dana


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