Journal of Contemporary Issues in Business and Government

Abstract

Failover is a very important feature of network. Generally customers will be using dual path
network environment. Whenever there is failure in one path, the path can be used and still
the network communication can continue. If there is no failover setup network
communication will be disturbed when there is failure in the path. Problem could on the
switch / routers in that path. On virtualized environmentNetwork Interface Card(NIC) will be
attached to VIOS(Virutal IO servers) and logical partitions will be sharing this NIC through
virtualization technique using the bridge layer SEA (Shared Ethernet Adapter). SEA will be
bridging the traffic between physical adapter and virtual adapters. Each of the LPAR(Logical
Partition) will have virtual ethernet adapter (VEA) and will be communicating through SEA
and physical adapter. In this paper, method to achieve faster failover when there is a failure
identified in one path is being proposed in this draft.