David Boyes wrote: > Dedicate the adapter to VM. OSA sharing is complicated and hard to set up.
I'm not sure what you see as complicated on sharing the OSA-E devices, other than doing the IOCP (and with Linux running in an LPAR they already have that done to share with MVS). When you use a virtual machine with Linux or VM TCP/IP as a router there's also changes to your IP network that can be difficult to get done. IMHO the choice for giving Linux virtual machines their own OSA device or a connection to a virtual router should be driven by things like bandwidth usage and network latency. Setup is a one-time issue, but poor performance is something for every day. You should expect network devices to operate more efficient at higher bandwidth in general. If you run all your traffic through a single OSA device you save CPU resources (at the cost of higher latency). This efficiency improvement at high bandwidth is less obvious for virtual network devices like IUCV because much of the CPU cycles are spent on copying data between virtual machines. So the short answer would be to use virtual routers in between, unless you have very specific bandwidth or latency requirements. And even with such requirements, the availability of network drivers for your kernel may force you to use a virtual router anyway. Rob
