VLANID considerations

The VLANID operand is optional on IPAQENET and IPAQENET6 INTERFACE statements with the OSD channel path ID type (CHPIDTYPE OSD). On a specific OSA transport resource list element (TRLE) basis, Communications Server enforces consistent VLAN definitions for INTERFACE statements that are associated with the same OSA TRLE.

For example, when VLANs are not used, the stack configuration allows only a single INTERFACE statement, and the VLANID operand is omitted on that INTERFACE statement. When VLANs are used, multiple INTERFACE statements are allowed and each INTERFACE statement must specify a unique VLANID value.

The OSD VLAN attributes of the IPAQENET or IPAQENET6 interface are propagated to the IBM® 10GbE RoCE Express® interfaces (associated RNIC) that have the same physical network identifier (PnetID) value. See Physical network considerations for more details on PnetID. Whether SMC-R communications use virtual LANs depends on the definition of the SMC-R capable OSD interfaces that are extended to the associated 10GbE RoCE Express interfaces. The 10GbE RoCE Express feature can be shared by TCP/IP stacks that are configured to use different VLAN capabilities for the 10GbE RoCE Express feature. You can use up to 126 unique VLANID values per RoCE Express port.

Depending on the operating mode, the number of VLANID values that can be used per 10GbE RoCE Express feature has the following limits:

• When the RoCE Express feature operates in a dedicated RoCE environment, up to 126 unique VLANID values can be used per port.
• When the RoCE Express feature operates in a shared RoCE environment, up to 126 unique VLANID values can be used per port. In addition, each virtual function (VF) PFID representation of the feature can use up to 16 VLANID values, although internal RoCE Express feature limitations might further reduce that maximum value for individual PFID representations.
  Result: Multiple VF representations of the same RoCE Express feature can use the same VLANID value, and only one of the available 126 VLANID values is used.

Results: If you define more unique VLANID values for one PnetID on the SMC-R capable INTERFACE statements than the 10GbE RoCE Express feature can support, the VLANID values of the last INTERFACE statements to be activated are not registered with the 10GbE RoCE Express feature. The IPAQENET or IPAQENET6 interfaces can start, but TCP connections that are established over these interfaces cannot use SMC-R communications. Netstat ALL/-A reports that display the TCP connections include the following diagnostic information for the connection:

SMCSTATUS:        INACTIVE                    
SMCREASON:        00005206 - VLAN ID NOT FOUND