Re: Ethernet Bridging -- MIDRANGE-L

If the guest partition and the host partition are on the same network
(which they must be if you want to assign an address to the adapter) then
you might be better using proxy ARP to assign an address to the guest.
https://publib.boulder.ibm.com/iseries/v5r2/ic2924/index.htm?info/rzalm/rzalmtcpip.htm

Personally I have found the Ethernet Bridging a really useful solution. The
chief advantage is it allows me to use one PORT per multiport NIC for a
partition (or partitions) rather than having to assign an entire card.

I found the HEA a bit clunky but only used t a couple of times.

On Wed, Aug 21, 2013 at 5:10 AM, Mitchell, Dana <dmitche@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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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