PowerVM networking concepts
PowerVM® includes extensive and powerful networking tools and technologies, which you can use to enable more flexibility, better security, and enhanced usage of hardware resources. Some of these terms and concepts are unique to the Power Architecture®.
Network connectivity in the PowerVM virtual
environment is highly flexible. PowerVM virtual
networking includes the following technologies:
| PowerVM technology | Definition |
|---|---|
| Virtual network | Enables interpartition communication without assigning a physical network adapter to each partition. If the virtual network is bridged, partitions can communicate with external networks. A virtual network is identified by its name or VLAN ID and the associated virtual switch. |
| Virtual Ethernet adapter | Enables a client partition to send and receive network traffic without a physical Ethernet adapter. |
| Virtual switch | An in-memory, hypervisor implementation of a layer-2 switch. |
| Virtual network bridge | A software adapter that bridges physical and virtual networks to enable communication. A network bridge can be configured for failover or load sharing. |
| Link aggregation device | A link aggregation (also known as Etherchannel) device is a network port-aggregation technology that allows several Ethernet adapters to be aggregated. |
