RE: [Xen-users] Multiple NIC and ports in XEN source and XEN enterprise

["Fischer, Anna" <anna.fischer@xxxxxx>]

> From: Venefax [mailto:venefax@xxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: 23 June 2008 12:12
> To: Fischer, Anna; D.Kalogeras@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Cc: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: [Xen-users] Multiple NIC and ports in XEN source and XEN
> enterprise
>
> I decided to assign a physical NIC to every DOMU, to minimize
> bottleneck,
> since my app is a telephony softswitch, and depends on network IO. I
> have 8
> NICS in the box and 8 softswitches.
>
> The question is, how can I do that?

A basic solution would be to create a bridge per physical NIC and then connect 
the DomUs to those bridges. You could also use PCI passthrough - in that case 
only the DomU would have access to the NICs and you would not see any traffic 
in Dom0.

> Also, is there a way to measure the
> network IO that each domu is generating, using dom0. I mean, without
> installing any software on domu's, only by looking at dom0?
> I have also heavy network traffic between domu's. How can I optimize
> that?
> Some of the domu's are in different networks, and I noticed that the
> packets
> go out on the internet and come back, which is ridiculous.

Not quite sure what you mean here... If you only do bridging in Dom0 and your 
VMs are on different networks then packets may need to go out of Dom0 in order 
to route them. But that depends on how you network is set up, it is not a Xen 
issue. What setup do you run in your Dom0? Do you use the bridge?

> How can that
> path
> be shortened? I imagined that since the mac addresses are local, XEN
> would
> be able to send it directly to the destination, is that even possible?

Yes, for example, if all your guests are on the same networks then the bridge 
would pass them directly to the correct destination. If you need to have the 
guests on different networks then you could do routing in Dom0.

> Finally, what brands are there for Virtualization-aware NICs? Maybe I
> will
> buy one.

For example: Neterion X3100, Solarflare Solarstorm, Mellanox ConnectX EN.


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