Hi gull04,

it's now sadly some time ago I actively worked with these beside some courses, but here we go (I hope the other guys correct me if there is an error in my explanation):

Basically each port will show up as single interface, like a 4 port NIC assigned to a VIOS will show as ent0, ent1, ent2, ent3.

Today you usually want to bind 2 physical adapters together with a main and a backup adapter which ist called an Etherchannel. You can also bundle adapters together (Link Aggregation) for performance reasons, but you can only have 1 backup adapter and that should be, as said, another physical adapter.
So it depends a lot on your layout how many networks you want to have connected to your systems.

Many setups I had to do with looked like this:

Code:

          ADMIN-LAN

        SWITCH    SWITCH
           |        |
           |        |
           |        |
           |        |
          ent0     ent1
           | main   | backup
           +--------+
                |
                |
               ent 2
                | EtherChannel
                +
                |
               ent 3 bridged vNIC (VLAN11)
                |
                =
                |
               ent 4
                | Shared Ethernet Adapter (SEA)
                | PortVLAN ID 11
                |
                |
                |
                |
                +------------------+-------------------+
                |                  |                   |
                |                  |                   |
                |                  |                   |
               LPAR A             LPAR B              LPAR C
               ent0               ent0                ent0
                  virtual NIC        virtual NIC         virtual NIC
                  PVID 11            PVID 11             PVID 11

You will also want a HASEA (High Available Shared Ethernet Adapter), so that in case of failure of the whole EtherChannel, the 2nd VIOS can take over - but I leave this out for now.

The EtherChannel is built with smitty etherchannel on the VIOS and don't forget to have no IP-address on the adapters you put together. The IP-address will be assigned later on the new generated SEA!

On the HMC you create a virtual Ethernet Adapter with a , that will be the virtual Ethernet Adapter with a Port VLAN ID (PVID, not the Physical Volume Identifier ) and check the box that it will be the adapter with contact to the outside physical LAN.
You also create the other virtual Ethernet Adapters that will be assigned to each LPAR via HMC, but they don't get the check in the box as they don't have a connection to the outside.

The SEA will be created on the VIOS command line by "fusing" the virtual Ethernet Adapter with the checked box for the outside communication together with the EtherChannel Adapter you created formerly out of the 2 physical adapters.

The assignment, which virtual Adapter in an LPAR corresponds to which SEA is solely defined by the PVID they share, in the "painting" above I took PVID 11 as example.

Next to this setup for the ADMIN LAN, you will probably have such a construct for a PROD LAN and a BACKUP LAN (network backup), but I was too lazy to "paint" them next to this

With 4x4 ports per box, you have different options now. If you have a very big load on the NICs, you can either bundle ent0, ent1, ent2, ent3 together in a Link Aggregation, so that they all 4 form up the "main" adapter in the EtherChannel and you get a lot of possible throughput. Though you will have to take a port of another physical adapter as the backup adapter for your Etherchannel. Though what to do with the rest of 3 ports on this physical adapter..?
If you don't need for aggregated ports, then you can setup maybe something like:

Code:

        physAdapter 1   physAdapter 2   Etherchannel

Port A  ent0            ent4            ent0 + ent4 = ent8
Port B  ent1            ent5            ent1 + ent5 = ent9
Port C  ent2            ent6            ent2 + ent6 = ent10
Port D  ent3            ent7            ent3 + ent7 = ent11
                                         |      |
                                        main + backup

Maybe someone else has a better idea how to assign your many ports, but it all depends on what you want/have to achieve.

For SAN, you will have to decide if you go for vSCSI or NPIV.
vSCSI will let you provide LVs, VGs or PVs from the VIOS to the LPARs. The LPAR will see them as normal hdisks.

NPIV is N-Port Virtualization and will virtualize a FC-Adapter which then can be assigned to the differnt LPARs. Doing this will create 2 new WWNs, 1 of these is for LPM (Live Partition Mobility), to which the LUNs from your storage will be zoned as usual.

I personally like NPIV more because the administration of the mappings for LUN/DISK-to-LPAR that comes with vSCSI is much more tideous work to handle instead of the zonings and the NPIV-WWNs assignments to the LPARs. The downside is, that you have to do driver updates on each LPAR where vSCSI will be updated on the involved VIOS.

This as a start and quick overview for your considerations.
The HASEAs, which you want to have for sure too, needs some more details when configuring the SEA, but I assume you will have to make your layout 1st.