Planning and Implementing VLANs with HP-UX

Figure 5 VLAN over APA
HP APA Aggregate
VLAN1 VLAN2 VLAN3 VLAN4 VLAN5
HP APA/LAN Monitor Failover Group
Workgroup
Applications
VLAN-aware network
HR Finance Marketing Engineering Manufacturing
HP server running HP-UX
VLAN Interfaces
APA Interfaces
Physical NICs
Using HP-UX VLANs with HP Virtual Machines (HPVM)
The HPVM product is part of the HP-UX 11i Partitioning Continuum and Virtual Server
Environment (VSE) technologies. HPVM is a soft partitioning and virtualization technology that
provides operating systems isolation, shared CPU (with sub-CPU granularity), shared I/O, and
automatic, dynamic resource allocation that is built in.
NOTE: For additional information about the VSE technologies, see http://hp.com/go/vse.
HPVM provides significant flexibility in the sharing of HPVM host network interfaces by one
or more HPVM guests virtually connected together through a virtual switch. Each association
between an HPVM guest and a virtual switch presents as a virtual network interface on the guest.
A virtual switch may be associated with, at most, one host network interface. The host network
interface might correspond to a physical NIC or it might be a logical network interface, such as
those formed by the HP Auto Port Aggregation (HP APA) product. The HP APA product provides
superior performance, scalability and failover capabilities in a network interface by using multiple
physical NICs.
The virtual switch, for the most part, emulates a physical Ethernet switch, and allows guests
sharing a virtual switch to communicate either with one another, with the HPVM host, or with
a remote host on the network. HPVM guests can be connected to one or more virtual switches.
Each such connection projects a virtual network I/O device on the guest and represents a link to
a virtual port on the virtual switch.
Starting with HPVM version 2.0, the HPVM virtual switch is VLAN aware. The HPVM guests
(OS) themselves are still not required to be VLAN aware. The virtual switch virtual ports can be
configured for port-based VLANs. Once configured for a VLAN, the HPVM virtual switch will
insert the VLAN tag on untagged frames originating from the HPVM guest and strip the VLAN
tag on frames destined to the guest. As with a VLAN-aware physical switch, the virtual switch
can be used to enforce network traffic isolation based on VLAN memberships of virtual-switch
ports.
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