5.1. Oracle VM Networking Overview

When you create an Oracle VM network, you map available network ports to a set of logical Ethernet networks. You perform this mapping in Oracle VM Manager.

The physical network is the collection of physical connections in Oracle VM Manager and all Oracle VM Servers, and the switches and routers that allow information to reach its destination.

A logical network in Oracle VM is built on top of these physical connections. Each physical connection is called a network port. Other names for this physical connection include network interface card, or NIC, or network interface.

You define a name or alias for each logical network that you create. When you have created your networks, you connect the physical network ports to the logical networks.

Before you define the logical networks in Oracle VM Manager, you have to review the physical network configuration that you intend to use, such as VLAN and subnet usage. You also take into account the number of network ports, or NICs, available to your Oracle VM Servers. The minimum recommended number of ports required on a single Oracle VM Server is two, although one would suffice for test or demonstration purposes. If you have more than two ports on your Oracle VM Servers, you can design more redundancy or traffic isolation in your environment.

Oracle VM supports both 1Gbit and 10Gbit NICs. All network functions can either be on dedicated or shared physical networks, except for the virtual machine intra-server. For example, a physical network can be dedicated to Virtual Machine or Storage only, or can be used for all network functions.