When you create a new network, you choose a network function and network elements to build this network. These network elements include network ports, bonds, or VLAN segments if VLANs are used in your environment. These network elements as well as the networks you create are stored as networking objects in the Oracle VM Manager database. Your Oracle VM Servers are unaware of these Oracle VM Manager network objects. Creating and managing network objects in Oracle VM Manager results in the configuration or deletion of the network devices (for example: ports, VLAN devices, bridges) present on Oracle VM Servers.

After reviewing your physical network environment and deciding on the logical distribution and grouping of these physical objects, you create the logical constructs in Oracle VM Manager to implement your network design. These logical constructs include:

A short description of these objects and their usage is given below in the following sections.

If your network design includes interface bonding, you create these network bonds first. A bond is the aggregation of network ports – in Oracle VM a maximum of two – to provide redundancy and depending on the bonding mode, to increase performance. These bonds are often used in conjunction with VLANs, when traffic from several VLANs is allowed to use the same bond.

If your network environment comprises VLANs, your next step is to create VLAN Groups. With VLAN Groups, you determine which port or bond, on each Oracle VM Server, will accept traffic from more than one VLAN. Next, you specify the VLAN segments, as VLAN IDs, that are part of the VLAN Group.

Once these network building blocks are in place, you are ready to create networks using Oracle VM Manager. For each network, you must answer two questions:

These building blocks determine the network type in Oracle VM Manager. The choices when creating a network are:

If you create a network with ports, these ports, located on the Oracle VM Servers that will participate in the network, cannot be part of an already existing network. If you intend to use port bonding, create the bond(s) before creating your network. If you intend to allow traffic from several VLANs on a single port or bond, create the VLAN Groups before creating the network.

When creating a VLAN Group, you provide the following information:

You can also create a network using a combination of VLAN interfaces, ports and bonds. If you choose this type of network, the bonds must be created first and the VLAN interfaces must already be part of an existing VLAN Group.

Finally, you can create a network which is intended for a single server. This type of network allows communication between the virtual machines running on a single Oracle VM Server, and does not allow external network traffic. A computing environment made up of several virtual machines, where the virtual machines provide services to each other over the network, could benefit from this type of network, without requiring additional network ports on the Oracle VM Server.

The next topics provide more information about network bonding, network bridges, VLAN Groups and VLAN segments. To create VLAN Groups, see Section 5.9, “Managing VLAN Groups”. To create networks, see Section 5.10, “Managing Networks”.