Ive Subsystem - IBM BladeCenter PS700 Technical Overview And Introduction

IVE provides logical Ethernet ports that can communicate to logical partitions (LPARs)
reducing the use of IBM POWER Hypervisor™. The design provides a logical connection for
multiple LPARs to a physical port, allowing LPARs to access external networks through the
HEA without using a Shared Ethernet Adapter (Ethernet bridge) through the Virtual I/O
Server. This eliminates the need to move packets (using Virtual Ethernet Adapters) between
partitions and then through a Shared Ethernet Adapter (SEA) to an physical Ethernet port.
LPARs can share HEA ports with improved performance.
Figure 2-18 shows the difference between IVE and SEA implementations.
Using Virtual I/O Server Shared Ethernet Adapter
Hosting AIX
Partition
Virtual
Packet
Ethernet
Forwarder
Driver
Virtual Ethernet Switch
Network Adapters
Figure 2-18 IVE compared to Virtual I/O Server Shared Ethernet Adapter
IVE design meets general market requirements for better performance and better
virtualization for Ethernet. It offers the following benefits:
Either two 1 Gbps HEA ports (PS700 and PS701) or four 1 Gbps HEA ports (PS702)
Logical ports assigned to LPARs for external network connectivity as an option to a
Virtual I/O Server provided Shared Ethernet Adapter (SEA)
Industry standard hardware acceleration, loaded with flexible configuration possibilities
The speed and performance of the GX+ bus
Great improvement of latency for short packets that are ideal for messaging applications
(such as distributed databases) that require low latency communication for
synchronization and short transactions
For more information about IVE features readIntegrated Virtual Ethernet Adapter Technical
Overview and Introduction, REDP-4340, available at the following Web page:
http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/redp4340.html

2.7.1 IVE subsystem

One of the key design goals of the IVE architecture is the capability to integrate up to two 10
Gbps Ethernet ports or four 1 Gbps Ethernet ports into the P5IOC2 chip, with the effect of a
low cost Ethernet solution for low-end and mid-range server platforms. Any 10 Gbps, 1 Gbps,
100 Mbps, or 10 Mbps speeds share the same I/O.
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IBM BladeCenter PS700, PS701, and PS702 Technical Overview and Introduction
AIX Linux
Virtual Virtual
Ethernet Ethernet
Driver Driver
Hypervisor
Using Integrated Virtual Ethernet
AIX
Virtual
Ethernet
Driver
Integrated Virtual Ethernet
LAN, WAN, ...
AIX Linux
Virtual Virtual
Ethernet Ethernet
Driver Driver