Standard TCP/IP routing is used to route traffic to the virtual Ethernet network in the same way you define routing to any other LAN. This requires that you update routing information throughout your network.
You can also route traffic to your partitions through your iSeries™ server with various routing techniques. This solution is not difficult to configure on the server but, depending on the topology of your network, it may not be practical to implement. Consider the following figure.
The existing TCP/IP interface (10.1.1.2) connects to the LAN. The LAN is connected to remote networks with a router. The virtual TCP/IP interface on partition B is addressed as 10.1.10.2 and the virtual TCP/IP interface on partition A as 10.1.10.1. In i5/OS™, if you turn on IP datagram forwarding, i5/OS will route the IP packets to and from partition B. When you define your TCP/IP connection for partition B, the router address must be 10.1.10.1.
The difficulty of this type of routing is getting the IP packets to the iSeries. In this scenario, you can define a route on the router so that it passes packets destined to the 10.1.10.0 network to the 10.1.1.2 interface. That works for remote network clients. It also works for the local LAN clients (clients connected to the same LAN as the iSeries) if they recognize that same router as their next hop. If they do not, then each client must have a route that directs 10.1.10.0 traffic to the i5/OS 10.1.1.2 interface; therein starts the impracticability of this method. If you have many LAN clients, then you must define many routes.
To configure virtual Ethernet to use the TCP/IP routing method, use the following instructions: