Specifications

138 IBM Power 770 and 780 Technical Overview and Introduction
The Virtual Fibre Channel adapter is used with the NPIV feature, described in 3.4.8, “N_Port
ID virtualization” on page 147.
Shared Ethernet Adapter
A Shared Ethernet Adapter (SEA) can be used to connect a physical Ethernet network to a
virtual Ethernet network. The Shared Ethernet Adapter provides this access by connecting
the internal hypervisor VLANs with the VLANs on the external switches. Because the Shared
Ethernet Adapter processes packets at layer 2, the original MAC address and VLAN tags of
the packet are visible to other systems on the physical network. IEEE 802.1 VLAN tagging
is supported.
The Shared Ethernet Adapter also provides the ability for several client partitions to share
one physical adapter. With an SEA, you can connect internal and external VLANs using a
physical adapter. The Shared Ethernet Adapter service can only be hosted in the Virtual I/O
Server, not in a general-purpose AIX or Linux partition, and acts as a layer-2 network bridge
to securely transport network traffic between virtual Ethernet networks (internal) and one or
more (EtherChannel) physical network adapters (external). These virtual Ethernet network
adapters are defined by the POWER Hypervisor on the Virtual I/O Server.
Figure 3-11 shows a configuration example of an SEA with one physical and two virtual
Ethernet adapters. An SEA can include up to 16 virtual Ethernet adapters on the Virtual I/O
Server that share the same physical access.
Figure 3-11 Architectural view of a Shared Ethernet Adapter
Tip: A Linux partition can provide bridging function also, by using the brctl command.
VIOS
Client 1
Ethernet
switch
VLAN=2 PVID=1
ent3
(sea)
en3
(if.)
en0
(if.)
Client 2
en0
(if.)
ent0
(virt.)
Client 3
en0
(if.)
ent0
(virt.)
ent1
(virt.)
ent2
(virt.)
ent0
(virt.)
VLAN=2
PVID=2
PVID=99
VID=2
PVID=1 PVID=1 PVID=1
VLAN=1
Hypervisor
External
Network
ent0
(phy.)