Virtual Lan; Extended Adaptive Cache - IBM i series Handbook

iSeries Architecture: Fundamental Strength of the iSeries
With OS/400 V5R1, LPAR is significantly enhanced to allow dynamic movement of processor,
memory, and interactive performance between partitions. Up to four OS/400 V5R1 partitions
per processor with a maximum of 32 partitions is supported.
Virtual LAN support establishes multiple high speed TCP/IP communication connections
between partitions. Additional communication hardware is not required.
Linux is now supported in a logical partition.
You can find more details on LPAR in "Logical Partitions (LPAR)" on page 473.

Virtual LAN

Virtual LAN is new with OS/400 V5R1. Virtual LAN provides 16 independent high speed
internal bus-to-bus communication paths between logical partitions and supports TCP/IP
protocol.
Virtual LAN provides the additional granularity to set up high speed communications between
partitions by being selective on which partitions or applications within a partition are allowed
to communicate with other logical partitions on the system. More importantly, it allows high
speed bus-to bus communication between OS/400 partitions and Linux partitions. It will be
possible to select multiple communications paths between partitions and potentially tie in
each of these paths to a specific application.
The enablement and set up of Virtual LAN is easy and does not require an IPL or any special
hardware or software. Once a virtual communications port is enabled for a given partition, a
communication resource (CMNxx) is created for that partition. The user can then create a
high speed 1 GB Ethernet line description over this resource and set up TCP/IP configuration
appropriately to start communicating to another partition. A maximum of 16 virtual ports can
be enabled for high speed communications per partition.
Virtual LAN does not require any additional software or hardware. It provides the ability to
provide multiple communication paths between applications that are executed in each of the
partitions.

Extended Adaptive Cache

Extended Adaptive Cache is an advanced read cache technology that improves both the I/O
subsystem and system response times by reducing the number of physical I/O requests that
are read from disk. Extended Adaptive Cache operates at the disk subsystem controller level.
It does not affect the system processor.
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iSeries Architecture: Fundamental Strength of the iSeries