Patent ID: 7277968

Claim:
A method of enhancing input/output (I/O) connectivity of a communications environment, said method comprising: providing a plurality of sets of I/O communications subadapters to an operating system image of the communications environment, said plurality of sets of I/O communications subadapters providing information to the operating system image relating to a plurality of components associated with the plurality of sets of I/O communications subadapters, and wherein at least one set of I/O communications subadapters of the plurality of sets of I/O communications subadapters comprises a plurality of I/O communications subadapters; and wherein the communications environment comprises a central processing complex having a plurality of logical partitions executing a plurality of operating system images, said central processing complex being coupled to a plurality of multiple image facility images, each multiple image facility image of one or more multiple image facility images of said plurality of multiple image facility images comprising a plurality of sets of I/O communications subadapters, and wherein the plurality of multiple image facility images are associated with one or more I/O subsystem images of an I/O subsystem coupled to the central processing complex, said I/O subsystem being configured as a plurality of I/O subsystem images, each I/O subsystem image appearing to the operating system as an independent and complete I/O subsystem.