Virtual Ethernet adapters are a proven virtualization technology under PowerVM. A virtual Ethernet adapter is created on the client LPARs, which forwards network packets to a virtual trunking adapter using the POWER hypervisor. The trunking adapter belongs to a virtual I/O server, which forwards the network packets to a physical Ethernet adapter using a so-called shared Ethernet adapter (SEA).

In the meantime, this technology is more and more replaced by SR-IOV and vNIC.