Blog by PQR

Configuration Challenge Part 1, Networking in Xenserver 5.5

As my colleagues already have explained in the two other parts of this Challenge, this part only focuses on tree Networking items meaning:

• Hardware redundancy for all network traffic from the Virtual Machine to Physical switch
• vLan Tagging
• Separate LAN traffic (IP Based Storage, LAN Traffic, Management Traffic)

The configuration can be done in two different ways:

• Using the console of the Xenserver and typing every command in the shell
• Using the free XenCenter installed on a Windows machine

To make thing a little easier to understand I will use screenshots of the configuration in Xencenter. Ok let's first focus on Hardware redundancy. As you can see we have 6 physical networkcards installed in the Xenserver.

We have connected the Nic's:

• Nic 0 and 1 to physical switch 1
• Nic 2 and 4 to physical switch 2
• Nic 3 to Storage switch 1
• Nic 5 to Storage switch 2

Now let's setup a network team to comply with the Hardware redundancy demand:

In the above picture we have setup a teamed setup (bond) for the Nic's 2 and 4. We can do the same steps for the other nic's. Resulting in the configuration shown Below.

This is really the only change which needs to be done for the Hardware redundancy demand. Now switching over to the Network section in XenCenter. There are now 3 different networks created, which we can use to our demand for Separate LAN traffic.

For your convenience we will rename the Network names to their intended purpose in the following picture:

And with this last picture we also have fulfilled the requirement for Separate traffic.

Now on to the Vlan configuration in the network section:

This concludes the Vlan inplementation in the network challenge, on to the next challenge !

Arjan Beijer