An important aspect of VIO Server design is high availability and resiliency for your client LPARs. However reliable the equipment is, failures do occur and there is always human error. Etherchannel or LACP allows you to provide enhanced network availability and throughput for your LPARs by bundling a number of VIOS Ethernet NICs together to […]
Time-saving tips for AIX device configuration
When you have a one-off command to run on AIX, you just type it in. If you have to do it hundreds of times, you are better off if you script it. But what if the scripting still isn’t fast enough? I recently had to remove hundreds of virtual SCSI (vSCSI) devices from a Virtual […]
Masterclass: VIO Server networking tips and techniques
Over the past few years, I have picked up a number of tips and techniques to help when working with LPARs on Power Systems that use VIOS for networking. VIOS can provide highly performant, resilient and redundant networking capabilities to IBM i, AIX and Linux LPARs. While customers are comfortable with VIOS networking capabilities once […]
AIX tech tip: make friends with the VIOS command syntax
If you are familiar with running commands on AIX, you may have logged onto the Virtual I/O Server and found the syntax frustrating. For example, the following command on AIX will list disks: lsdev –Cc disk But when you’re logged into the restricted shell on the VIOS (usually as the user ‘padmin’), that will give […]
How to make IBM i work with VLANs
Prior to its 7.2 version, IBM i had no concept of VLANs. They had to be managed externally. However, I am going to show you how to get IBM i to cooperate in a VLAN environment pre-v7.2. I am also going to demonstrate how simple it is to set up a v7.2 IP interface to […]