[libvirt] Bridged network (shared physical device) and libvirt

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Dec 08, 2008 at 11:16:32AM +0000, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-12-08 at 10:00 +0100, Chris Lalancette wrote:
> > Henrik Persson E wrote:
> > > Are there any plans to include possibility to configure bridged networks
> > > in libvirt?
> > > I see the need to be able to actually be able create vlans on physical
> > > devices and the bridge the vlan, which I guess is a very normal case for
> > > isolating network traffic between different guests.
> > > 
> > > I would be great if it would be possible to both create vlans on
> > > physical devices and then also create bridged network connected to any
> > > available network (physical/bonded/vlan)
> > 
> > This is functionality we are actually missing for ovirt as well.  I had done a
> > proof of concept patch a while ago (you can search the libvirt archives), but it
> > wasn't comprehensive enough.  In particular, it could deal with putting a
> > physical device into a bridge, but didn't make any provision for bonding and
> > VLANs, both of which are needed to have a correct solution.  It needs some
> > thought about the XML design, and then it can probably be implemented.
> 
> I see this stuff as system configuration and, as such, should be handled
> by e.g. NetworkManager:

There's no reason why libvirt network mgmt APIs couldn't call out to
NetworkManager in the background as their impl. In addition if we ever
want to have network management in libvirt which works on existing OS
deployed to then we'll need an impl that uses initscripts for config.
Finally if we ever get a VMWare driver, then we'd want to invoke their
APIs for bridge configuration in that context. So there's value in having
network mgmt APIs in libvirt. Oh and network manager doesn't provide any
remote RPC capabilities

Daniel
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