[CentOS] Bonding and Xen

Tue Jul 15 21:54:49 UTC 2008
Luke S Crawford <lsc at prgmr.com>

"Victor Padro" <vpadro at gmail.com> writes:
> Does anyone has implemented this sucessfully?

I have not used bonding with xen, but once you have a bonded interface in the 
Dom0 it should be trivial.  setup your bonded interface as usual, then in
/etc/xend-config.sxp where it says (network-script network-bridge) 
set it to

(network-script 'network-bridge netdev=bond0')

it should just work.


> These servers are meant to replace MS messaging and intranet webservers
> which holds up to 5000 hits per day and thousands of mails, and probably the
> Dom0 could not handle this kind of setup with only one 100mbps link, and
> could not afford changing all the networking hardware to gigabit, at least
> not yet.


100Mbps is a whole lot of bandwidth for a webserver unless you are serving 
video or large file downloads or something. 100Mbps is enough to choke a
very powerful mailserver, nevermind exchange.

I suspect that if you are using windows on Xen, disk and network I/O to and
from the windows DomU will be a bigger problem than network speeds.  Are
you using the paravirtualized windows drivers?  without them, network and
disk IO is going to feel pretty slow in windows, no matter how fast the
actual network or disk is.