Virtual Networking - Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER 11 - VIRTUALIZATION Manual

5

Virtual Networking

All VM Guest need some means to communicate either with other VM Guest systems
or with a local network. The network interface to the VM Guest system is made of a
split device driver, which means, that any virtual ethernet device has a corresponding
network interface in Domain0. This interface is setup to access a virtual network that
is run in Domain0. The bridged virtual network is fully integrated into the system con-
figuration of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and can be configured with YaST.
When installing a Xen VM Host Server, a bridged network configuration will be pro-
posed during normal network configuration. The user can choose to change the confi-
guration during the installation and customize it to the local needs.
If desired, Xen VM Host Server can be installed after performing a default Physical
Server installation using the Install Hypervisor and Tools module in YaST.
This module will prepare the system for hosting virtual machines, including invocation
of the default bridge networking proposal.
In case that the necessary packages for a Xen VM Host Server are installed manually
with rpm or zypper, the remaining system configuration has to be done by the admin-
istrator manually or with the help of YaST.
The network scripts that are provided by Xen are not used by default in SUSE Linux
Enterprise Server. They are only delivered for reference but disabled. The network
configuration that is used in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is done by means of the
YaST system configuration similar to the configuration of network interfaces in SUSE
Linux Enterprise Server.
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