Originally posted by: Wouter Liefting
I'm not sure this is going to work out of the box.
On whole-host virtualization solutions such as VMWare ESX or PowerVM/LPAR, the hypervisor implements a virtual network switch, and then bridges this virtual network switch to the outside world using a software bridge (SEA in VIO-speak). Leave out the software bridge and you've got an isolated network. Obviously all your VMs/LPARs on that switch will have access to it, plus your hypervisor/VIOs. So you can do what you describe here.
With WPAR technology there is no such isolated network. Instead, the IPs of the WPARs are aliased onto existing network adapters in the global environment. That gives connectivity to the outside world. But there is no isolated network or software bridge involved. (*)
If you want your WPARs on an isolated network, with some sort of firewalling/port forwarding to gain access, you will need to set this up outside of the WPAR context. You can for instance set up your AIX LPAR with a whole bunch of virtual ethernet adapters on an isolated network managed by PowerVM (PowerVM Hypervisor Virtual Switch). You then assign these virtual ethernet adapters as-is to your WPAR. (So you're not configuring them in AIX and alias the WPAR IP on top of them, but instead assign the whole device to a WPAR, using the mkwpar -D command.)
You can then use another AIX system, or the VIO server, to do the port forwarding onto this isolated network.
Hope this helps.
(*) Incidentally, if you assign an IP address to a WPAR but this IP address does not fall in any of the networks to which the host AIX system is connected to (as determined by the AIX IP/subnetmask combo), the mkwpar/chwpar command will not be able to figure out onto which adapter this WPAR IP address needs to be aliased. So this may be where your warning/error is coming from. Apparently, and fortunately for you, the code somehow picked the right ethernet adapter for the alias, so things work. But do make sure things will keep on working in the future, use the -N interface=... parameter to force the IP aliasing to happen on that particular interface.
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