February 7, 201412 yr I have set up a virtualized server using Xenserver, and have not had to handle networking beyond using XenCenter. When I make the switch to unRaid as the Dom0, I want to have a good understanding of the networking part of running the VM's. Now, in XenCenter, I assign a NIC to a VM and that's that. I could have installed (apparently) a virtual bridge/interface for the VM's to talk to each other; which, would seem to increase speed and be the right way to do it, but learning curves. ;-) So, can someone point me to a good guide for setting up networking on Xen? I have found all kinds of very technical stuff written for datacenters, but nothing really honed down to home server use. If one isn't really out there, I will help write one if someone can volunteer to answer my questions as I go along. What I envision is having unraid as Dom0 having one NIC it shares only with my Plex-Server, so that my Rokus are all properly fed and other "activities" don't interfere with unraid's primary job of serving files. All of the other VM's would share the other NIC. Then, assuming I have read the manuals right, there would be a virtual bridge between the VM's and the VM's and the Dom0-unraid-array to keep all of the inter-VM traffic off of my router and inside the box. Am I planning this out correctly? Are there better ways to do this? Look forward to the replies.
February 7, 201412 yr I do not have unRAID 6.0 in front of me so I can't say if it has this capability yet (it would be easy to add if it doesn't)... unRAID You would set up each NIC with it's own Bridge. eth0 - xenbr0 eth1 - xenbr1 eth2 - xenbr2 VMs 1. Within each VM cfg file you assign a unique MAC Address (from what I see some users are not doing this) so if you can assign a dedicated IP address it gets from the DHCP server or if you assign a static IP within the VM itself. 2. Within each VM cfg file you assign which NIC / Bridge (xenbr0, xenbr1, xenbr2, etc.) you want the VM to use. Example of how my system is setup... xenbr0 - unRAID (I also have mysql, xbmc and several other things running on it). xenbr1 - A couple of VMs for Media Downloads and various other apps and development VMs. xenbr2 - 2 XBMCs VMs using PCI Passthrough to various TVs throughout my house. When I get bored and have some free time, I will add another dual NIC and passthrough the entire card to a pfSense VM.
February 8, 201412 yr Author Ok, so now I have more questions. I looked up pfSense and read up, and that really looks interesting. I know there is another thread already going on that subject, so I will watch it and see what develops. Still, until then, I will look through what can find on Xen networking....
February 8, 201412 yr Ok, so now I have more questions. I looked up pfSense and read up, and that really looks interesting. I know there is another thread already going on that subject, so I will watch it and see what develops. Still, until then, I will look through what can find on Xen networking.... I'm not sure what you need to read up on regarding networking. Each NIC has it's own dedicated bridge assigned to it. You can assign whatever bridge you want to your individual VMs.
February 8, 201412 yr Author Grumpy and ShortBus, am I right conceptually that if I set it up with each NIC having it's own bridge, that the VM's would talk to each other virtually (in the box), even if I say unplugged the ethernet cable from the box? I am looking to maximize speed and minimize traffic over my router, if that's possible.
February 8, 201412 yr Grumpy and ShortBus, am I right conceptually that if I set it up with each NIC having it's own bridge, that the VM's would talk to each other virtually (in the box), even if I say unplugged the ethernet cable from the box? I am looking to maximize speed and minimize traffic over my router, if that's possible. You can have the Host start and VMs start without a network. However, if your XBMC VM is communicating with MySQL (for your database / libraries) and NFS (how you stream movies) to the Host (which has MySQL and your Movies Files) without a network up and running and plugged... It's not going to work. You can split traffic between several NICS (which I do running Gig Ethernet) but they are all going to hit the same router. Your bottleneck should you have one would be on the router. On my cheap EnGenius router... I can stream 4 XBMCs at once (1080p with HD Audio), have 2 or 3 computers (also Gig Ethernet), several phones / iPADS (Wireless) all going at once and I don't have issues, delays, slow internet browsing, etc. I'm not sure how many devices / users you have but I'd be surprised if you have to go down the VLAN / separate routers / QoS / subnetting / etc. roads.
February 8, 201412 yr so xen has no virtualswitch as vmware has as i think that is what gtoryp wanted an internal virtual switch so he can for example setup a mysql vm which only uses that virtual switch and is not going out of the box?
February 8, 201412 yr so xen has no virtualswitch as vmware has as i think that is what gtoryp wanted an internal virtual switch so he can for example setup a mysql vm which only uses that virtual switch and is not going out of the box? Xen can use Open vSwitch but Tom is currently using Bridge-utils. I have used Open vSwitch in a Business / Enterprise environment but it adds a bunch of complexity / features that I don't think most unRAID users will want / need / use. Perhaps you could "sell" it Tom on why he wants to add it and he might consider it.
February 8, 201412 yr Author A virtual switch is exactly what I was looking for (and didn't know it.)
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.