AIX Creating EtherChannel Devices from Command Line

I needed to create some EtherChannel devices on several AIX LPARs, and did not want to go through the smit panels every time.

I was testing network performance and wanted to add these to a script, so I could test standalone adapter configurations vs EtherChannel configurations, and leave my scripts running over night.

Here are the steps to create an EtherChannel device on AIX.

Create the eth device.  My primary Ethernet adapter is ent1 and the backup adapter is ent3.  This EtherChannel device will fail-over to the backup adapter and fail-back to the primary automatically.  The netaddr supplied is a reliable network device to ping to confirm which adapters are up or down, so I used the default gateway.

mkdev -c adapter -s pseudo -t ibm_ech -a adapter_names='ent1' -a backup_adapter='ent3' -a netaddr='192.168.2.1' -a num_retries='2' -a retry_time='1'

Create the et and en devices.

/usr/lib/methods/defif

Now add the IP address to the EtherChannel device.

chdev -l en4 -a netaddr=192.168.2.100 -a netmask=255.255.255.0 -a state=up

To clean up and delete the EtherChannel, just rmdev the ent, en and et devices, then configure one of the standalone adapters with the servers IP address as needed.