I'm not a aix or vio guru, more of a Solaris guy.

I have a frame with 2 vio servers and a few client lpars. Recently the frame was moved to a new network as the old one was running out of ips.

The problem surfaced after the move and I've more or less confirmed that the connections to oen vio server was not moved by the network guys.

Each vio server has two network connections (etherchannel), besides that they also have two network connections used for heartbeats ( veritas cluster).

Here's the problem -

When the primary vio server is shut down all network connectivity is lost to the backup vio server and client lpars (I can still log in on console) . I've confirmed that the network failover happens (entstat -d on the sea show's it's active on the backup vio server)

When I asked the network guys to check (gave them the mac address of the virtual adapter on both vio servers) they came back and said the primary vio server's mac was on the wrong network (old subnet).

I'm trying to figure out
1) why if the primary is on the wrong network everything works fine till you shutdown the primary.
2) why I'm able to log in to the primary vio server when it's on the wrong network.
3) Is there any way to capture traffic on the physical ports so I can confirm which network they actually are on (like snoop in solaris. tcpdump requires to up the interface which I can't seem to be able to do)

What I doubt is the old info was still there with VIO1,
try doing lsattr -El inet0 and see how many default G/W's you see? you must see only one, if you are seeing more than one then, you need to correct it.
ex:
route net,-hopcount,0,,0,10.10.X.XX.

I think they never changed VLAN on the pirmary VIO, thats why you were able to get in to it. Since VIO1 and VIO2 had different VLAN's on same SEA, it crapped out.

SARFARAZ AHMED SYED,
Sr. Systems Engineer