Ilya Ponetayev instenet@gmail.com writes:
You may create as many bridges as you want to have virtual interfaces, each bridge consisting only of connection to single VM, and handle traffic between bridges and between physical interfaces of host through iptables/iproute.
In that case, I`d prefer not to have bridges. Things are easier to deal with when you only have those network devices you actually need. Dangling bridges seem to be pretty obsolete.
IHMO bridging is the most proper and popular technique because it provides the most flexible configuration. Your VM sees NIC as Ethernet card (so with all L2 features), so either you can terminate this L2 pipe with bridge in host, and perform L3/higher level handling, or you can use for example DHCP server on host binded to your bridge, or VLAN-handling config.
Bridges are cool when you actually need them. That doesn`t mean that they must be there when not needed.
Is there something I don`t understand which makes them always a requirement? If so, perhaps it would be a nice feature if we were able to hide bridges we don`t need.