On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 2:34 PM, Smithies, Russell Russell.Smithies@agresearch.co.nz wrote:
I’ve got xen-3.0.3-105.el5_5.5 running on Centos 5.5 and all is running smooth but I notice that any VMs running under it only have access to Realtek RTL8139C at 100 Mbps nics.
In general, don't bother. Let the virtualization server handle all the cute features of the network interfaces, because it's going to *anyway* as part of its role translating the kernel operations of the virtualized driver into real hardware interactions with the NIC you actually use.
We have 4 x 1G nics configured in a port channel so I’d really like to be able to give my VMs 1000Mbps nics.
Actually test the performance, and if possible, use a para-virtualized kernel. You should see surprisingly good performance.
Does anyone know if this is possible and how to do it?
If not, does KVM support faster nics because at this point it would be fairly simple to change.
See above. In reality, I'll be surprised if you don't easily outperform a physical RealTek device.