The Virtual Ethernet point to point connection is the default virtual network connection between the iSeries™ hosting partition and each integrated Windows server. The point to point connection is used primarily for administrative operations which are part of the integration environment.
The iSeries and Windows CPU utilization cost of using the point to point connection is similar to the utilization cost of using a hardware network adapter. The connection is high speed, but total bandwidth is always shared with disk, tape and other operations on IXS and IXA adapters. When you use internet SCSI (iSCSI), you can separate virtual Ethernet operations by using another iSCSI HBA channel.
A Virtual Ethernet connection between two or more integrated servers uses the iSeries CPU to switch the traffic between servers, even when the iSeries server is not an endpoint of the traffic. For most connections this utilization won't be significant. But, if you expect high sustained network loads across the virtual Ethernet connection between integrated servers, you might want to balance the cost of using the Virtual Ethernet internal switch against external network adaptors on the integrated servers.
