Assigning MAC Addresses Automatically or Manually

You must have enough media access control (MAC) addresses to assign to the number of logical domains, virtual switches, and virtual networks you are going to use. You can have the Logical Domains Manager automatically assign MAC addresses to a logical domain, a virtual network (vnet), and a virtual switch (vsw), or you can manually assign MAC addresses from your own pool of assigned MAC addresses. The ldm subcommands that set MAC addresses are add-domain, add-vsw, set-vsw, add-vnet, and set-vnet. If you do not specify a MAC address in these subcommands, the Logical Domains Manager assigns one automatically.

The advantage to having the Logical Domains Manager assign the MAC addresses is that it utilizes the block of MAC addresses dedicated for use with logical domains. Also, the Logical Domains Manager detects and prevents MAC address collisions with other Logical Domains Manager instances on the same subnet. This frees you from having to manually manage your pool of MAC addresses.

MAC address assignment happens as soon as a logical domain is created or a network device is configured into a domain. In addition, the assignment is persistent until the device, or the logical domain itself, is removed.

Range of MAC Addresses Assigned to Logical Domains Software

Logical domains have been assigned the following block of 512K MAC addresses:

00:14:4F:F8:00:00 ~ 00:14:4F:FF:FF:FF

The lower 256K addresses are used by the Logical Domains Manager for automatic MAC address allocation, and you cannot manually request an address in this range:

00:14:4F:F8:00:00 - 00:14:4F:FB:FF:FF

You can use the upper half of this range for manual MAC address allocation:

00:14:4F:FC:00:00 - 00:14:4F:FF:FF:FF

Automatic Assignment Algorithm

When you do not specify a MAC address in creating logical domain or a network device, the Logical Domains Manager automatically allocates and assigns a MAC address to that logical domain or network device. To obtain this MAC address, the Logical Domains Manager iteratively attempts to select an address and then checks for potential collisions.

Before selecting a potential address, the Logical Domains Manager first looks to see if it has a recently freed, automatically assigned address saved in a database for this purpose (see Freed MAC Addresses). If so, the Logical Domains Manager selects its candidate address from the database.

If no recently freed addresses are available, the MAC address is randomly selected from the 256K range of addresses set aside for this purpose. The MAC address is selected randomly to lessen the chance of a duplicate MAC address being selected as a candidate.

The address selected is then checked against other Logical Domains Managers on other systems to prevent duplicate MAC addresses from actually being assigned. The algorithm employed is described in Duplicate MAC Address Detection. If the address is already assigned, the Logical Domains Manager iterates, choosing another address, and again checking for collisions. This continues until a MAC address is found that is not already allocated, or a time limit of 30 seconds has elapsed. If the time limit is reached, then the creation of the device fails, and an error message similar to the following is shown.

Automatic MAC allocation failed.  Please set the vnet MAC address manually.

Duplicate MAC Address Detection

To prevent the same MAC address from being allocated to different devices, one Logical Domains Manager checks with other Logical Domains Managers on other systems by sending a multicast message over the control domain's default network interface, including the address that the Logical Domain Manager wants to assign to the device. The Logical Domains Manger attempting to assign the MAC address waits for one second for a response back. If a different device on another LDoms-enabled system has already been assigned that MAC address, the Logical Domains Manager on that system sends back a response containing the MAC address in question. If the requesting Logical Domains Manager receives a response, it knows the chosen MAC address has already been allocated, chooses another, and iterates.

By default, these multicast messages are sent only to other managers on the same subnet; the default time-to-live (TTL) is 1. The TTL can be configured using the Service Management Facilities (SMF) property ldmd/hops.

Each Logical Domains Manager is responsible for:

• Listening for multicast messages

• Keeping track of MAC addresses assigned to its domains

• Looking for duplicates

• Responding so that duplicates do not occur

If the Logical Domains Manager on a system is shut down for any reason, duplicate MAC addresses could occur while the Logical Domains Manager is down.

Automatic MAC allocation occurs at the time the logical domain or network device is created and persists until the device or the logical domain is removed.

Freed MAC Addresses

When a logical domain or a device associated with an automatic MAC address is removed, that MAC address is saved in a database of recently freed MAC addresses for possible later use on that system. These MAC addresses are saved to prevent the exhaustion of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses from a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server. When DHCP servers allocate IP addresses, they do so for a period of time (the lease time). The lease duration is often configured to be quite long, generally hours or days. If network devices are created and removed at a high rate without the Logical Domains Manager reusing automatically allocated MAC addresses, the number of MAC addresses allocated could soon overwhelm a typically configured DHCP server.

When a Logical Domains Manager is requested to automatically obtain a MAC address for a logical domain or network device, it first looks to the freed MAC address database to see if there is a previously assigned MAC address it can reuse. If there is a MAC address available from this database, the duplicate MAC address detection algorithm is run. If the MAC address had not been assigned to someone else since it was previously freed, it will be reused and removed from the database. If a collision is detected, the address is simply removed from the database. The Logical Domains Manager then either tries the next address in the database or if none is available, randomly picks a new MAC address.