HP-UX vPars and Integrity VM V6.1.5 Administrator Guide (5900-2295, April 2013)

• VSP physical network interface card (pNIC) — the physical network adapter, which may be
configured with Auto Port Aggregation (APA). (For more information about APA, see the HP
Auto Port Aggregation (APA) Support Guide.)
NOTE: Trunking software such as APA is supported on the VSP and on DIO interfaces in
the guest. AVIO interfaces is not supported on the guest.
APA can be configured on the VSP to provide a highly available LAN for the vswitch (APA in
active/passive mode) or to increase the bandwidth of the vswitch LAN (APA active/active
mode). Before you stop APA, use the hpvmnet -h command to halt the vswitch. If you do
not halt the vswitch first, the hpvmnet command reports an incorrect MAC address for the
vswitch.
• Guest virtual network interface card (vNIC) — the virtual network adapter, as recognized by
the guest operating system.
• Virtual switch (vswitch) — the virtual network switch maintained by the VSP that is associated
with a pNIC and can be allocated to one or more guests.
Vswitches must not be connected to network devices that are set to promiscuous mode. Do
not run applications like tcpdump on the VSP on interfaces that are used for virtual switches.
Using redundant pNICs and APA, you can ensure high availability of the guest networks and
provide greater capacity for the VSP system running many guests with network-intensive applications.
You can configure HP-UX VLANs for the guests. VLANs isolates broadcast and multicast traffic by
determining which targets should receive that traffic, thereby making better use of switch and
end-station resources. With VLANs, broadcasts and multicasts go only to the intended nodes in
the VLAN.
10.2 Creating and managing vswitches
The following sections describe how to create, modify, delete, and manage vswitches.
10.2.1 Creating vswitches
To allow guests to access network devices, you must create vswitches on the VSP. This section
describes how to create a vswitch and verify that it has started.
To create vswitches, use the hpvmnet command. The following is the basic format of the hpvmnet
command to create a vswitch:
hpvmnet -c -S vswitch-name -n nic-id
This command format includes the following options:
• -c indicates the creation of a vswitch.
• -S vswitch-name specifies the name of the vswitch.
• -n nic-id specifies the network interface on the VSP that the new vswitch will use. For
example, —n 0 indicates lan0. Network interfaces are displayed by the lanscan command.
If you do not include the -n option, a local vswitch is created, as described in Section 10.2.1.1
(page 149).
The hpvmnet command also allows you to display and manage the vswitches on the VSP. Table 21
describes the options to the hpvmnet command.
146 Creating virtual networks