Christian Lahti wrote:
Hi Mark:
Thank you very much for your response, I did indeed read the original poster as Dale by mistake :) So what you are saying makes perfect sense to me and sounds like exactly what we are after, I will have 3 vlans to bridge myself ultimately. My next question is the relative merits of RHEL5.1 as compared to Fedora 8. Obviously I would prefer the stable enterprise release rather than bleeding edge Fedora, but has fully virtualized windows performance been fixed in this release? At any rate I am looking forward to getting this up and running tomorrow!
/Christian
________________________________
From: Mark Nielsen [mailto:mnielsen@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Sat 12/1/2007 3:19 PM
To: Christian Lahti
Subject: Re: Fedora Core 8 + Xenbr0 + network bridging?
hmm, did you mean "Hi Mark" ??
I have 8 Dell 2950s running RHEL 5.1 (new libvirt with that funky NAT
they added). I have 4 NICs in each; 2 copper, 2 fiber. I bond the 2
copper (eth0 and eth1) and call it bond0. bond0 carries my "private" IP
for cluster suite communications on the dom0 (physical) cluster.
Then I bond eth2 and eth3 (fiber) in to bond1. I lay down the public
network for the dom0 cluster on bond1.100 (for example, that would be
VLAN 100). I also add many (up to 10 or so now) VLANs on bond1
(bond1.20, bond1.21, bond1.22, etc). Then I create xen bridges to each
of these bond/VLAN devices. This allows me to put any particular VM on
any particular (or combination up to 3) of these xen bridged bonded VLAN
device.
My document explains, in detail, how to do all of this :) The only added
step is that I have to "undefine" (virsh net-undefine default) the
default network that the new libvirt creates (virbr0). Even with this
new NAT thing they added, I've been told (by our devs) that the
preferred way to do static network configurations is with the method I
lay out. NAT is more for dynamic networks (cable modems, dial-up, wifi,
etc).
I'm pretty sure there weren't any significant changes in Fedora 8 (we've
dropped the word "core" now, btw) that don't exist in RHEL 5.1 with
respects to the network. 5.0 -> 5.1 is when that NAT change came down
the pipe.
Mark
p.s. I'm happy to answer any other questions you may have about my
document. I'm quite certain that, if you follow it, you'll have what
you're looking for.
Christian Lahti wrote:
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.
In your position, I might consider another Sunday to see whether the f8
tools run on C5, and not, then what's needed.
The -xen kernel's probably needed along with the most obvious *virt*.
There might not be a lot of building to do, and the odds are good that a
Fedora kernel will "just work," depending on whether you need extra drivers.
--
Cheers
John
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