HP-UX vPars and Integrity VM V6.3 Administrator Guide

8.1 Introduction to AVIO network configuration
The guest virtual network configuration provides flexibility in network configuration, allowing you
to provide high availability, performance, and security to the vPars or VM guests running on the
VSP.
The virtual network configuration consists of the following components:
• VSP pNIC – the physical network adapter, which might be configured with 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 DIO interfaces in the guest.
Trunking of AVIO interfaces is not supported on the guest.
You can configure APA on the VSP to provide a highly available fault-tolerant LAN for the
vswitch (APA in active or passive mode) or to increase the bandwidth of the vswitch LAN (APA
active or 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 vNIC — the virtual network adapter, as recognized by the guest operating system.
• Virtual switch — the virtual network switch that is associated with a pNIC. This is maintained
by the VSP, and can be allocated to one or more guests.
CAUTION: You must not connect the vswitches to the network devices that are set to promiscuous
mode and do not run applications such as 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 that is running many guests with network intensive
applications.
You can configure HP-UX VLANs for the guests. VLANs isolates broadcast and multicast traffic by
determining the targets that must 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.
8.2 Creating virtual networks
You can allocate virtual network devices or vNICs to the vPar or VM guest when you create them
with the hpvmcreate command or when you modify an existing vPar or VM guest using the
hpvmmodify command, as described in Chapter 10 (page 153) and Chapter 9 (page 133). To
add a vNIC to a guest, use the following command option:
nl
-a
network:adaptertype:bus,device,mac-addr:vswitch:vswitch-name:portid:portnumber
However, before you allocate the vswitch to the vPar or VM guest, you must create the vswitch
using the hpvmnet or vparnet command.
8.2.1 Creating and managing vswitches
The following sections describe how to create, modify, delete, and manage vswitches.
8.2.1.1 Creating vswitches
To allow guests to access network devices, you must create vswitches on the VSP.
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
112 Creating virtual and direct I/O networks