Hi Dale:
 
I work with David who posted the original question to the mailing list.  I think we need to give a bit more background info on what we are trying to do.  We are running a mixed environment of mostly CentOS 3, 4and 5, we do have a few windows servers and XP systems as well.  We are looking to virtualize all these platforms.  Normally we have a bonded pair of NICs for the physical hosts, we were able to get this running using CentOS 5 x86_64 with no problems, the guest machines use the bonded pair in bridged mode as expected after a bit of tweaking.  The biggest issue we found with EL5 is that windows guest performace is dismal at best, hence our decision to have a look at Fedora Core 8 x86_64.  I am happy to report that performance for all of our guest platforms is *very* good with FC8, but it seems that libvirt changed the way networking is setup for Xen.  The default NAT configuration is pretty useless for production server environment.  Thanks to the mailing list we are now able to bridge a single NIC on FC8 (like eth0 for example), but we cannot figure out how to get a bridge for bond0 (comprised of eth0 and eth1) defined and available to Xen.  All the tweaks that worked find on EL5 have not worked so far on FC8.  I am going to review your document tomorrow and give it a try, but any idea on whether your methodology will work on FC8 and libvirt?  I am willing to blow a Sunday to get this worked out once and for all :)
 
Basically we are after good performance on both para and fully virtualized guests using a bonded pair of GB NICs for speed and redundancy.  If this can be achieved with enterprise linux then that would be preferable, but we will go FC8 if the bonding thing can be sorted out.  By the way Xensource 4.x looks to be a respin of RHEL5 and has pretty good performance but their free version is limited to 32bit (and hence 4GB ram).  Adding the clustering failover is the next step of course :)
 
Thanks again for the help so far.
 
/Christian
 
 
 
>>>>>>>>>>>
just FYI for the list, I have a how-to for a bonded and VLAN tagged network.

http://www.certifried.com

ODT and PDF formats available.
It might not be the best way, but I've sent it out to my colleagues several times and have never received any negative feedback. 
Mark



Dale Bewley wrote:

I haven't done bonding, but you should be able to bond them and then compose a bridge on top of this bonded device I would think.

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Dale Bewley - Unix Administrator - Shields Library - UC Davis
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