Dear Community,

some of the last posts are about IBMi and SR-IOV and / or vNIC. Very interesting!!!

One of my customers asks me to change the running config for his production vm's away from 10GbE

( configured as SEA in a dual VIOS config ) to 25GbE ( p10 1022s; 2* EC2T  PCIe3 LP 2-Port 25/10Gb NIC&ROCE )..
I have a test VM so i can play a little bit. I try'd two different configs.

1. SR-IOV Adapter in VM profil with option migratable and a vNIC

2. dynamic VM config / adding a vNIC from each phys. Adapter with xx % capacity.

During failover tests i had the following behavior. For 1 ( SR-IOV ); if we shut down the SR-IOV Port; there was no failover to the vNIC,

so connection was lost. For 2 ( only vNIC ) behavior was as aspected; 2-3 pings are lost if we shut down the active port and switch over to another...

My question is, do i have a misunderstanding about the SR-IOV / vNIC config or  is there somthing missing in my config? If it works as

designed i will change to vNIC ( config 2 ). VIOS will stay on the 10GbE with SEA...

Thx and regards,

Dear Community,

some of the last posts are about IBMi and SR-IOV and / or vNIC. Very interesting!!!

One of my customers asks me to change the running config for his production vm's away from 10GbE

( configured as SEA in a dual VIOS config ) to 25GbE ( p10 1022s; 2* EC2T  PCIe3 LP 2-Port 25/10Gb NIC&ROCE )..
I have a test VM so i can play a little bit. I try'd two different configs.

1. SR-IOV Adapter in VM profil with option migratable and a vNIC

2. dynamic VM config / adding a vNIC from each phys. Adapter with xx % capacity.

During failover tests i had the following behavior. For 1 ( SR-IOV ); if we shut down the SR-IOV Port; there was no failover to the vNIC,

so connection was lost. For 2 ( only vNIC ) behavior was as aspected; 2-3 pings are lost if we shut down the active port and switch over to another...

My question is, do i have a misunderstanding about the SR-IOV / vNIC config or  is there somthing missing in my config? If it works as

designed i will change to vNIC ( config 2 ). VIOS will stay on the 10GbE with SEA...

Thx and regards,

Hello Jens,

using 2 vNIC the failover is done by VIOS (failover to backing device). If you want to use SR-IOV with option migratable and a vNIC as backing device (it is called Hybrid Network Virtualization) you have to do the failover in the IBM i LPAR by VIPA. So if the failover doesn't work it is a problem in the IBM i setup. See:

https://community.ibm.com/community/user/power/blogs/charles-graham1/2020/06/19/hybrid-network-virtualization-using-sr-iov-for-opt

Regards, Harald Stürner

Dear Community,

some of the last posts are about IBMi and SR-IOV and / or vNIC. Very interesting!!!

One of my customers asks me to change the running config for his production vm's away from 10GbE

( configured as SEA in a dual VIOS config ) to 25GbE ( p10 1022s; 2* EC2T  PCIe3 LP 2-Port 25/10Gb NIC&ROCE )..
I have a test VM so i can play a little bit. I try'd two different configs.

1. SR-IOV Adapter in VM profil with option migratable and a vNIC

2. dynamic VM config / adding a vNIC from each phys. Adapter with xx % capacity.

During failover tests i had the following behavior. For 1 ( SR-IOV ); if we shut down the SR-IOV Port; there was no failover to the vNIC,

so connection was lost. For 2 ( only vNIC ) behavior was as aspected; 2-3 pings are lost if we shut down the active port and switch over to another...

My question is, do i have a misunderstanding about the SR-IOV / vNIC config or  is there somthing missing in my config? If it works as

designed i will change to vNIC ( config 2 ). VIOS will stay on the 10GbE with SEA...

Thx and regards,