Adding new VLAN to SEA

I have a 2 VIOS SEA failover setup. When adding a new VLAN to the SEA, I create a new Virtual Trunk adapter with the new VLANs to be added.

This process has worked well, however the most recent time I performed it on 4 servers, 2 had problems – no traffic whatsoever to the LPAR, and strange results using the seastat and/or entstat commands.

The problem seems to be that the new trunk adapters have their priority confused. To see this, run the following on each VIO LPAR (where ent15 is the SEA at hand):

$ entstat -all ent15 | grep -i active
Priority: 1  Active: True
Priority: 1  Active: True
Priority: 1  Active: False

There you see the issue is that the 3rd adapter is in the inactive state. The 2nd VIOS LPAR will show the opposite.

It appears that the order that the trunk adapter are created and/or mapped is the culprit. Here’s my solution:

  1. Remove the virtual adapter from each SEA on both VIOS LPARs (ie – rmdev ent29, en29, et29)
  2. Remove the adapters from the VIOS LPARs via DLPAR on the HMC
  3. Add the new adapters via DLPAR from HMC, primary VIOS first
  4. Discover the new adapters, primary VIOS first
  5. Add the new adapters to the SEAs, primary VIOS first.