Oracle VM Server requires at least one stable and static IP address that does not change over server reboots. If you use DHCP within your environment, you should configure your DHCP server to assign static DHCP addresses to the systems on which you will be installing Oracle VM Server. This ensures that your host always receives the same IP address. The behavior of the Oracle VM Server host is undefined if used in an environment where your IP address may change due to DHCP lease expiry.
If your DHCP server is configured to provide a default gateway, this could impact on the behavior of Oracle VM Server as the gateway provided over DHCP would override any statically defined gateway set on Oracle VM Server. Therefore, Oracle recommends that you ensure that your DHCP server is not configured to provide a default gateway unless you are certain that the default route is the one that you want your Oracle VM Server instances to make use of.
Many actions performed within
Oracle VM Manager
require that server hostnames are properly resolved. It is
highly recommended that a DNS server is configured on your
network and that the hostnames for each Oracle VM Server can be
resolved by all of the systems within your Oracle VM
environment. If this is not feasible, you may need to add host
entries to /etc/hosts on each Oracle VM Server
after you have finished your installation. Since it is easy
for these entries to become outdated, resulting in difficulty
when troubleshooting, this approach should be avoided.
Technically, it is possible to run Oracle VM Server with a single network interface per physical server. During the installation of each Oracle VM Server the management interface is configured, and during discovery by Oracle VM Manager the server management interfaces are included in the default management network. Since the management network is capable of providing all network functions in Oracle VM, including storage and virtual machine traffic, there is no functional need for additional networks. Even if you wish to separate different types of network traffic, a single interface is enough: the management network can be run on a VLAN and additional network connections can be made via VLAN interfaces configured on top of the single physical network interface.
The main reasons to opt for multiple physical network interfaces are:
Security. You may wish to keep internal and inter-server traffic separated from networks with a route to the internet. Or you may need to guarantee that network traffic from different virtual environments, or different types of network traffic, are physically separated.
Redundancy. You do not want your environment to stop working if one network interface fails. A good way to avoid this is to aggregate two interfaces in a bond interface. A bond port, as it is called in Oracle VM, can work in active-backup mode, but also increases performance when used as an aggregation of two active links with twice the bandwidth and load balancing.
Performance. If you have multiple physical network interfaces, link aggregation is a good way to add bandwidth for a given network function. In addition, or as an alternative, you can create multiple physical networks and use them for dedicated functions; for example a separate storage network or a network for virtual machine traffic only.
Oracle VM Ethernet network functionality can be applied to standard 10/100/1000Mbit Ethernet interfaces as well as 10Gbit Ethernet interfaces.