Virtual Machines

[Ali Imran Abbas]

I am configuring BL860 server for hosting two virtual machines using integrity VM. I am doing this for the first time, although I have some prior experience with vpars and npars. I have some questions in this regard.

1-What are VIO and AVIO devices?

2-Does localnet vmswitch correspond to some physical network card in the machine?

3-What about the other vmswitch which acts as virtual network card for vm machines.

I need some explanation in this regard to build my concept. I have read the documentation but still things are not clear.

[melvyn burnard · Accepted solution]

1-What are VIO and AVIO devices?

The VIO is the "standard" virtualised drivers used for passing I/O to/from the Guest OS in a VM, and teh AVIO is teh Advanced Virtual I/O that helps increase I/O throughput currently only for HP-UX guests, but shortly available for Windows guests

2-Does localnet vmswitch correspond to some physical network card in the machine?

NO, this is an "internal " vswitch which can be used for networking between VM Guests, but is NOT useable by the VM Host, nor does it get attached to a real NIC card.

3-What about the other vmswitch which acts as virtual network card for vm machines.

What about them?

[Ali Imran Abbas]

I mean do we need to create a vmswitch for each physical network card present in the machine and then associate it with VM or the procedure is different. I just need some clarification in the process of creating of vmswitch that correspond to physical NIC.

[melvyn burnard]

the choice is yours.
You can create a single vswitch associated to a physical NIC, and then add the vswitch to each and every VM, or create a seperate vswitch/NIC pair and give each VM it's own individual vswitch, or a combination of these
e.g create two vswitches, each associated to a physical NIC, and the have two VM's share a vswithc, or even have all VM's share both vswitches if you wish a VM to have two virtual NICs

[Ali Imran Abbas]

So From the discussion I conclude:

As I have to create two virtual machines on one blade server, I will create 1 vmswitch which os local i-e localnet and then 4 more vmsitches each associated with a pNIC. Put the two VM's on the localnet vmswitch so that they can communicate each other and then assign two vmswitches (those corresponding to pNIC) to each virtaul machine so that each VM has two NICs.

Pls make correction in my approach if I am wrong.