[fedora-virt] Bridged Networking - Virtual Environments

[Jorge Fábregas]

Hello everyone,

I'm learning about bridged networking and how it is applied to virtual
environments (bypassing all the automation provided by libvirtd etc) .
I have a question regarding ip configuration for the virtual bridge.

Let's say I have a host (my machine) where I want to run 3 VMs bridged
to my home network (thru eth0).  I have a DHCP server running on my DSL
router, and I have dhcp enabled on my 3 VMs so they all should get a
lease from the DHCP.

As far as a I know these are the raw steps needed to accomplish this:

1- create br0
2- remove current ip address from eth0
3- enslave eth0 to br0
4- create tap devices
5- attach tap devices to br0
6- assign tap devices to every VM

As you can see I haven't assigned an ip address to the virtual bridge
(br0).  Why is it that (on almost any site that I visit with this setup)
they always end up assigning an ip address to br0?

Thanks in advance!
Jorge