This is a short post
about KVM Network Bridge Configuration for Guest Domain over a bonded Interface. For this post, we're using a Redhat Enterprise Linux 6 as KVM Physical System, but the procedure can be easily
adjusted for any others Linux System which supports KVM. Before delving in the Technical Configuration, let’s have a look on what we’re trying to achieve. We’re having
a Physical Server with 02 Physical Interfaces (eth0 and eth1) and are planning
to use these two physical Interfaces in a highly available configuration. The
same interfaces are also used to support a bridge that is used by KVM DomU (Guest
Hosts). Below, we can see a picture describing the details of this configuration.
The first thing to do is to complete the bonding configuration and that's pretty straightforward. We're just creating the bonding.conf file in /etc/modprobe.d (to dynamically
load the bonding module, bonding's option will be modified later on and must reflects ones' needs), then
we're editing the ifcfg-bond0 network configuration files.
Let us now configure the bond0 Interface by editing its configuration files, note the BRIDGE configuration
mentioned below, this is explicitly added to link the bond interface to the
bridge interface. We are also setting the bond Interface parameters here.
Next thing to do is
to configure the bridge Interface, as usual we’re creating the ifcfg-br0 file containing our network
configuration (IP, DNS...). Note that as described above, this is the Interface that will have the IP settings used to administrate the Physical Server (Note that this is a matter of architecture/design, on a typical production server with four interfaces, we could have for example separated this management network from the Guest Domains Network...)
Finally, we can configure
the physical interface and restart the network service (or reboot the node…)
