IBM Power 780 Technical Overview And Introduction page 156

Figure 3-11 shows a configuration example of an SEA with one physical and two virtual
Ethernet adapters. An SEA can include up to 16 virtual Ethernet adapters on the Virtual I/O
Server that share the same physical access.
VLA N=2
Figure 3-11 Architectural view of a Shared Ethernet Adapter
A single SEA setup can have up to 16 virtual Ethernet trunk adapters and each virtual
Ethernet trunk adapter can support up to 20 VLAN networks. Therefore, a possibility is for a
single physical Ethernet to be shared between 320 internal VLAN networks. The number of
shared Ethernet adapters that can be set up in a Virtual I/O Server partition is limited only by
the resource availability, because there are no configuration limits.
Unicast, broadcast, and multicast are supported, so protocols that rely on broadcast or
multicast, such as Address Resolution Protocol (ARP), Dynamic Host Configuration
Protocol (DHCP), Boot Protocol (BOOTP), and Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP), can
work on an SEA.
IP address: A Shared Ethernet Adapter does not need to have an IP address configured
to be able to perform the Ethernet bridging functionality. Configuring IP on the Virtual I/O
Server is convenient because the Virtual I/O Server can then be reached by TCP/IP, for
example, to perform dynamic LPAR operations or to enable remote login. This task can be
done either by configuring an IP address directly on the SEA device or on an additional
virtual Ethernet adapter in the Virtual I/O Server. This leaves the SEA without the IP
address, allowing for maintenance on the SEA without losing IP connectivity in case SEA
failover is configured.
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IBM Power 770 and 780 (9117-MMD, 9179-MHD) Technical Overview and Introduction
VIOS
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