Virtualization: December 2009 Archives

The dynamic disk feature of Windows Server is quite efficient when it comes to work into a Sun xVM environment. The 30 GB disk "Disk 0" is handled by the OpenSolaris Dom-0 as a ZFS block volume:

"dladm" also allows to define VLAN trunking and VLAN usage with OpenSolaris.

You may assign specific VLANs to xVM virtual domains/machines (DomU) as well as use them in Dom0 or in your bare OpenSolaris using zones or not.

The physical interface (e1000g0) will act as the native vlan interface in this example, producing packets without a 802.1q vlan tag.

Defining VLANs with dladm is simple:

Solaris has a nifty utility named "dladm" which creates "dynamic" links.

It can be used to:

• work with virtual network interfaces
• work with wireless interfaces (WiFi)
• work with virtual switches (named etherstubs and bridges)

For our Xen-based xVM environment, a virtual switch to connect DomU's to an internal network is a common configuration. This virtual switch may even have an interface to the Dom0 system - the path to the outside world.