Designing XenServer Network Configurations
About
This guide helps you understand design your XenServer networking and design a networking configuration for XenServer environments. It includes the following topics:
- Best practice information about the primary management interface, NIC bonding, jumbo frames, and storage networks
- High-level information about features you may want to enable as part of your networking configuration, such as the Distributed Virtual Switch solution
- The correct sequence in which to configure XenServer networking, including guidance about cabling XenServer hosts and connecting them to physical switches
- Checklists to help you gather requirements for your XenServer networking configuration
Audience
Before reading this guide, you should have a basic knowledge of networking. This guide has several audiences:
Systems Architects. Systems architects who are designing a virtualized environment.
Infrastructure Engineers and Network Administrators.Networking and storage professionals who configure storage or manage the Layer 2 network infrastructure in their organizations.
Application Administrators. XenApp and XenDesktop administrators who are implementing a virtualization solution to virtualize Citrix products, IT infrastructure, or other applications they manage.
This guide assumes that you are familiar with basic XenServer concepts, including XenServer installation, XenCenter, resource pools, and the pool master.
Purpose of the Guide
This guide is meant to provide you with the best-practice information you need to design your XenServer networks.
To provide you with the foundation you need to understand the recommendations, the first half of the guide provides an explanation of XenServer networking concepts using a scenario-based approach.
The second half of the guide provides you with information to help you select between various XenServer networking options and information about the best ways to configure them.
Because this is a design guide, it generally does not provide configuration instructions except as needed to clarify concepts. As the most common way of managing XenServer and XenServer pools is through XenCenter, this guide mainly refers to XenCenter and XenCenter help, unless specified differently.