Chapter 5. Red Hat OpenShift installation planning and considerations 85
PowerVM HA
The VIOS configuration includes the following specifications when LPAR is used with a 
production OpenShift Container Platform:
/SM590000If I/O virtualization is used, a dual-VIOS setup is mandatory. You can have more than two 
VIOSes in the system that separates different environments, such as production and test 
or multiple customers
/SM590000Each VIOS must be configured with at least two dedicated or dedicated donating cores for 
any production systems. Size them as needed and monitor CPU usage to adapt to 
workload changes over the life of the system.
/SM590000At least one Fibre Channel card per VIOS is needed. It is recommended to have two to 
remove the single points of failure (SPOFs).
/SM590000At least two Ethernet cards per VIOS are needed. Interfaces with 10 GbE are needed at a 
minimum for scale-up systems. For scale-out systems, a speed of at least 10 GbE is 
mandatory.
/SM590000Enable VIO servers for Live Partition Mobility (LPM).
/SM590000Configure your VIO servers with NPIV (if present) and are supported by the operating 
system, or with the Shared Ethernet Adapter (SEA) Failover with Load Sharing if they are 
not supported. The following options are available for setting up virtual networks on your 
VIO servers:
–S R _ I O V
Not supported by PowerVC. Shares parts of a dedicated network adapter among 
several partitions. Works with all current IBM AIX, IBM i, and Linux distributions. 
Restrictions: Prevents Live Partition Mobility, restrictions on Etherchannel. Max 20 VM 
per network port.
–v N I C
SR_IOV enhanced with Live Partition Mobility support. No Etherchannel or bonding 
support. Maximum 20 VM per network port.
– vNIC failover
Provides server-side high availability solution (similar to SEA failover). In the vNIC 
failover configuration, a vNIC client adapter can be backed by multiple logical ports, 
preferably allocated from a different SR-IOV adapter and hosted by different VIOSes to 
avoid a single point failure. 
At any time, only one logical port is connected with the vNIC adapter. If the active 
(connected) backing device or its hosting VIOS fails, a new backing device is selected 
to serve the client. The selection of the active backing device is done by the POWER 
Hypervisor. 
In contrast to the SEA failover, the vNIC failover does not rely on any communication 
protocol between or among the multiple backing devices. The vNIC failover resorts to 
the POWER Hypervisor as the decision maker because it (the POWER Hypervisor) 
has a complete view and receives the real-time status of all the backing devices and is 
best situated for selecting the correct logical port. Without the implementation of the 
communication protocol, the vNIC failover is a much simpler, and more robust solution.