Re: [Fedora-xen] Fedora Core 8 + Xenbr0 + network bridging?

[Christian Lahti]

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.
	
	--
	Dale Bewley - Unix Administrator - Shields Library - UC Davis
	GPG: 0xB098A0F3 0D5A 9AEB 43F4 F84C 7EFD  1753 064D 2583 B098 A0F3
	
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