On Wednesday, 08/01/2007 at 06:43 EDT, Mark Post <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> In addition to the VSWITCH that Rich talked about, each port on an OSA card > provides between 15 and 48 network interfaces (depending on the model), and you > can have multiple OSA cards. All but the OSA-Express2 10 GbE Long Range OSA > allows you to have 2 ports per card. So, you don't have 130 separate NICs, but > a much smaller number than that. I visited one customer site that had a > _bunch_ of OSAs in their z9. Far more than they would have needed if they'd > implemented VSWITCH. I imagine their IBM hardware sales rep was very happy > though. On a z9 with z/VM 5.3, a single VSWITCH can aggregate up to 8 dedicated OSA ports providing load balancing and failover. Need more bandwidth? Define a second VSWITCH. On older releases or processors, the VSWITCH will drive only a single OSA port, though you can define up to two additional ports for backup (no load balancing). If you are sharing an OSA *port* among multiple guests or LPARs, you can have up to 640 IP stacks using that *port*. Of course, that's only interesting if you aren't using the VSWITCH. If you're using the VSWITCH, CP drives the card himself; the guest has a virtual NIC that has no relationship to the real NIC used by CP. The number of ports per OSA card (aka "feature") varies depending on the specific type of card. Alan Altmark z/VM Development IBM Endicott ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
