Xen DomU's do not have network access on bonded NICs

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Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 Service Pack 1

Situation

When the physical NICs have been bonded the following may exist:

Xen Dom0 looses network access when in Xen kernel, but network access works correctly in non-Xen kernel
Xen DomU's do not have network access, but Dom0 does.

Resolution

For SLES 10 SP1 and earlier, bonding is not supported by SuSE Development while running in the Xen kernel; there a variety of reasons for this, but most it has to do with the default handling of creating the network devices. Further, the default Xen Networking script, network-bridge, does not handle multiple NICS very well.

In the future release of SLES 10 SP2 the "network-bridge" script will support VLANs and bonding.

Disclaimer

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