Installation guide

Chapter 11. Pre-Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Xen networking
This chapter covers special topics for networking and network configuration with the Xen hypervisor.
Most guest network configuration occurs during the guest initialization and installation process. To
learn about configuring networking during the guest installation process, read the relevant sections
of the installation process, Chapter 7, Guest installation overview.
Network configuration is also covered in the tool specific reference chapters for virsh (Chapter 26,
Managing guests with virsh) and virt-manager (Chapter 27, Managing guests with the Virtual Machine
Manager (virt-manager)). Those chapters provide a detailed description of the networking
configuration tasks using both tools.
Note
Using para-virtualized network drivers improves performance on fully virtualized Linux guests.
Chapter 12, Xen Para-virtualized Drivers explains how to utilize para-virtualized network drivers.
11.1. Configuring mult iple guest net work bridges t o use mult iple
Et hernet cards
To set up network bridges (with the Xen hypervisor):
1. Configure another network interface using either the system-config-network application.
Alternatively, create a new configuration file named ifcfg-ethX in the
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ directory where X is any number not already in use.
Below is an example configuration file for a second network interface called eth1:
$ cat /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth1
DEVICE=eth1
BOOTPROTO=static
ONBOOT=yes
USERCTL=no
IPV6INIT=no
PEERDNS=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
IPADDR=10.1.1.1
GATEWAY=10.1.1.254
ARP=yes
2. Copy the file /etc/xen/scripts/network-bridge to /etc/xen/scripts/network-
bridge.xen.
3. Comment out any existing network scripts in /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp and add the line
(network-xen-multi-bridge).
A typical xend-config.sxp file should have the following line. Comment this line out. Use
the # symbol to comment out lines.
network-script network-bridge
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