Virtual MAC Addresses for VNFs

Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) rely on their hypervisor environment for MAC address establishment, advertisement and resolution. As such, you cannot derive these addresses using the same method as you do for Acme platforms. For VNFs, Oracle recommends establishing private MAC addressing for virtual MAC address configuration.

To support HA, you configure virtual Ethernet (MAC) address MAC addresses based on the Burned In Addresses (BIA) of the media interfaces. To determine what the virtual MAC addresses should be, you first identify a BIA and then calculate the virtual MACs based on that.

To define the virtual addresses you need to configure for each interface:

1. Identify the base MAC of eth0/wancom0 physical interface using the show interfaces command. For example, in the following display, you can see the base MAC is 00:50:56:C0:00:08:

   eth(unit number 0):
   Flags: (0x78843) UP BROADCAST MULTICAST ARP RUNNING INET_UP
   Type: ETHERNET_CSMACD
   inet: 111.22.0.123
   Broadcast address: 111.22.255.255
   Netmask 0xffff0000 Subnetmask 0xffff0000
   Ethernet address is 00:50:56:C0:00:08

2. Set the bottom nibble of the first byte to 2 to define the address as locally administered.
3. Set the top nibble of the first byte to 0 and increment it for each interface.

For example, using the base-MAC for eth0, 00:50:56:C0:00:08, you assign the virtual addresses as follows:

• First media interface virtual MAC = 02:50:56:C0:00:08
• Second media interface virtual MAC = 12:50:56:C0:00:08
• Third media interface virtual MAC = 22:50:56:C0:00:08
• Forth media interface virtual MAC = 32:50:56:C0:00:08