The Book of Xen

Defining Virtual Interfaces

All of the Xen networking options work by creating virtual interfaces in dom0 to serve as targets for bridging, iptables rules, and so on. Each virtual interface is defined by a section in the vif= line of the config file, delimited by a pair of single quotes.

Xen 3 supports up to eight virtual interfaces per domain (three prior to 3.1.) For example,

vif=['','','']

defines three virtual interfaces and tells Xen to configure them with sensible defaults. Note that they're comma-separated and delimited, in accord with Python array syntax.

You can examine these virtual interfaces from the dom0 by typing

# ifconfig -a

This will output information for a bunch of devices of the form

vifx.y

where x and y are numbers. (You might see ...