Shared Ethernet Adapter - IBM Power 595 Technical Overview And Introduction

At the time of writing, virtual SCSI supports Fibre Channel, parallel SCSI, iSCSI, SAS, SCSI
RAID devices and optical devices, including DVD-RAM and DVD-ROM. Other protocols such
as SSA and tape devices are not supported.
For more information about specific storage devices supported for Virtual I/O Server, see:
http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/set2/sas/f/vios/documentation/datasheet.html
Note: Virtual SCSI interfaces can be configured for both dedicated CPU (LPAR) and
shared processor pool (SPLPAR) logical partitions.

3.7.2 Shared Ethernet Adapter

A Shared Ethernet Adapter (SEA) is used to connect a physical Ethernet network to a virtual
Ethernet network. The SEA provides this access by connecting the internal Hypervisor
VLANs with the VLANs on external switches. Because the SEA processes packets at layer 2,
the original MAC address and VLAN tags of the packet are visible to other systems on the
physical network. IEEE 802.1 VLAN tagging is supported.
The SEA also provides the ability for several client partitions to share one physical adapter.
Using an SEA, you can connect internal and external VLANs using a physical adapter. The
SEA service can only be hosted in the Virtual I/O Server, not in a general purpose AIX or
Linux for Power partition, and acts as a layer-2 network bridge to securely transport network
traffic between virtual Ethernet networks (internal) and one or more (EtherChannel) physical
network adapters (external). These virtual Ethernet network adapters are defined by the
POWER Hypervisor on the Virtual I/O Server
Tip: A Linux for Power partition can provide bridging function as well, by using the brctl
command.
Figure 3-5 on page 123 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.
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IBM Power 595 Technical Overview and Introduction