VIOS V1.5.2 provides several key enhancements in the area of POWER Virtualization.

• VIOS network bandwidth apportioning. The bandwidth apportioning feature for the Shared Ethernet Adapter (SEA), allows the VIOS to give a higher priority to some types of packets. In accordance with the IEEE 802.1q specification, VIOS administrators can instruct the SEA to inspect bridged VLAN-tagged traffic for the VLAN priority field in the VLAN header. The 3-bit VLAN priority field allows each individual packet to be prioritized with a value from 0 to 7 to distinguish more important traffic from less important traffic. More important traffic is sent faster and uses more VIOS bandwidth than less important traffic.
• Virtual I/O Server Command Line Interface (CLI) was enhanced to support Image Management commands. The CLI is in a unique position to have access to virtual disks and their contents. Users will be able to make a copy of virtual disks and install virtual disks using the Image Managemant command, cpbd. This command will allow other programs to create and copy virtual disk images.
• The Virtual I/O Server runs on Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) networks, therefore users can configure IPv6 type IP addresses.
• The updates to the Systems Planning and Deployment tool include updates to ensure none of the existing VIOS mappings are changed during the deployment step.