Professional Xen® Virtualization

Chapter 8. Xen Networking

Creating, configuring, and managing physical networks can be extremely complex. Routing, performance, and security issues can combine to require fairly complex networking topology to support restricted-access networks, hosts in a demilitarized zone between public and private networks, and so on.

Although virtual machines on a single physical host typically share network interfaces, using virtual machines doesn't free you from worrying about networking and security issues. All virtual machines on a given physical host require unique network addresses, just as physical hosts do. Xen virtual machines use virtual network interfaces to connect their emulated network devices to a network. Xen provides you, as a system administrator, with a great deal of flexibility in how you configure network interfaces, create virtual networks, and how your virtual machines communicate with the physical network. This makes it very easy for you to logically connect multiple virtual machines in different ways — such as segregating them on their own virtual network and using multiple Ethernet interfaces on your domain0 system to route different types of virtual and physical traffic — and to efficiently and securely connect virtual networks to your physical network.

This chapter discusses the various ways that Xen supports connecting domainU (and domain0) hosts to your network. It discusses the different types of networking configurations provided out-of-the-box with Xen, the configurable ...