On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 5:54 PM, Jack quiet_celt@yahoo.com wrote:

Objective: I'm installing XEN on a server I'm building. The server has two NICs, and will have a dual connection to the Internet, with 5 fixed used IP addresses. I plan to run 3 guests. One of those guests will use two IPs , hopefully.

Reading the KVM documentation (I'm also considering KVM, if XEN doesn't work out) and the XEN documentation leaves me a bit confused on the network bridging.

The XEN documentation seems to indicate you NEED to have two NICs to do this. The KVM documentation seems to indicate you need to bridge in order for the guests to be network visible. But what I want to do is make sure that either one or both NICs are visible to any given guest.

So can I bridge, both NICs independently? Or merge them into one fatter pipe? Or something else.

Thanks, Jack

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Any documentation that indicates that you can't run a bridge on a system with one NIC is, well, wrong. The key is that you need to put your IP address on the bridge interface.

So something like:

brctl addbr br0 brctl addif br0 eth0

ip address delete [inet address from eth0]/32 dev eth0

ifconfig br0 [inet address from eth0]

Then utilize the br0 interface in the vif stanza and you're in business.

Some folks seem to think its necessary for the bridge setup/tear-down be in /etc/xen/scripts. I prefer to use the OS network configuration gadgetry myself, but I suppose inserting it into the xen network script infrastructure makes it more distro/portable.