Hello there,

lp-hea are the native adapters attached to the Balde itself (they are HEA, and each HEA has 4 Logical ports). We use them, say for the first installation or for servers where you don't want redundancy, they are SPOF (single point of failure) adapters.

Virtual adapters (l-lan), are created at VIOS/client level, we create them at VIO level to define the priority of VIOS and add multiple vlans to it. At client level we create those for it to communicate to outer world.

Physical cable are the actual cables from which the traffic goes in and out of the Blade, without the physical port your virtual adapter at VIO are of no use.

Now coming to SEA (shared ethernet adapter), to create a SEA you need a physical adapter, a virtual adapter (actually two, one with trunking priority, vlans (if you want) and other is called control channel adapter, ctrl chan adapter is the heart beat of SEA). Then the VIO create a new adapter called SEA, remember that SEA will not be visible from HMC, you can only see it when you are in VIO.

If you have SEA, it will be redundant and you can avoid SPOF.