Copyright © 2011, 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Legal Notices
It is recommended that you install Oracle VM on a machine with a static IP address. If your machines use DHCP, you should configure your DHCP server to assign static DHCP addresses. This makes sure your host always receives the same IP address. The behavior of the Oracle VM host is undefined if used in an environment where your IP address may change due to DHCP lease expiry.
If you use DHCP, you may also encounter problems with the default gateway. Linux systems set the default gateway using the route provided by the DHCP server, regardless of the setting in the computer running Oracle VM. This may not be the default route you want. If you use DHCP, you should configure the DHCP server to not provide the default gateway for the machines running Oracle VM.
Technically, it is possible to run Oracle VM with a single network interface per physical server. During the installation of the Oracle VM Servers 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.
Copyright © 2011, 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Legal Notices