Thanks for the info Bakunin.



I created virtual adapters in both VIOSs however they were for ISCSI disk interfaces. The virtual adapter for network was created in LPAR and not VIOS. While creating this virtual adapter the PVID was kept same as that of the PVID of existing adapter in VIOS. This is something which is getting followed from past and I don't have enough documentation to know why. The overall setup looks like this:



Env is HMC based
Two VIOS partitions
One NIM partiion


Virutal Ethernet adapter in VIOS looks like this

Code:

Adapter ID:2Virtual switch:ETHERNET0Port Virtual Ethernet (VLAN ID):xx:FalseIEEE 802.1q compatible:TrueAdditional VLAN IDs:xxxx  xxxx  Access external network:TrueTrunk priority:1

Virtual ethernet adapter in new LPAR looks like this

Code:

Adapter ID:2Virtual switch:ETHERNET0Port Virtual Ethernet (VLAN ID):xxRequired:FalseIEEE 802.1q compatible:TrueAdditional VLAN IDs:xxxx  Access external network:False

Now my understanding was LPAR adapter will get mapped to VIOS adapter via the PVID which is same for both. And additional VLAN IDs added here are for external network.
The problem I'm seeing is that external network is not reachable from the new LPAR and the only difference between new and old lpar(which is working fine) is an additional interface in old LPAR of type VLAN.
en1 and ent1 below are missing in new LPAR.

Code:

old-lpar# lsdev | grep ^en
en0        Defined         Standard Ethernet Network Interface
 en1        Available       Standard Ethernet Network Interface
ent0       Available       Virtual I/O Ethernet Adapter (l-lan)
ent1       Available       VLAN

Now I'm wondering if this VLAN type interface was somehow manually created earlier for some specific config handling or if it's something which was getting created automatically when the LPAR virtual ethernet adapter was created earlier but now is not happening because of some bug or something which is broken in the HMC environment. I'm not sure if this is the root cause though unless I've it in new LPAR as well.

Few questions for my clarity:
Q1> What is this interface of type VLAN stand for and when does it get created.
Q2> If LPARs(multiple) and VIOS all have same PVID then all LPARs should be able to communicate directly without involving VIOS. And then the additional VLAN ids added to LPAR adapter and VIOS adapter are to take care of external network communication. Is this understanding correct?