Live Migration and Bridge Settings

[Christopher Boumenot <boumenot@yahoo.com>]

Greetings,

I'm having a problem with live migration, and the default network 
settings used by Xen.  I was hoping someone could give me advise on what 
I'm doing wrong.

I currently have three Linux installations, two of the PCs are running 
SuSe 9.1/Xen 2.0.5 with the stock xenU and xen0.  The third PC is 
running coLinux (debian) on a WindowsXP machine that exports the Xen's 
test ttylinux distribution in a flat file.

For this setup I have both Xen hosts NFS mount a directory containing 
the image.  I start a ping process on one of the Xen hosts to monitor 
network connectivity.  I then live migrate the VM from one to host to 
the other.  The ping process will usually fail for approximatley 15-20 
seconds (sometimes upto ~50 seconds), and then eventually restart.  The 
VM migrates properly.

I've looked at several tcpdump traces to see if I could find the 
unsolicited arp being sent, but I don't.  In fact I see the Xen host 
with the ping process re-issue the arp to find the IP address, and then 
the pings succeed.  I added some debug code to the netfront driver to 
verify that the arp is in fact being queued, and everything looks fine.

I started to suspect that something is wrong with my bridge setup.  I 
started out using the default Xen vif-bridge scripts, but I found that 
the VM only had connectivity to dom0.  The VM wasn't able to ping other 
hosts on the subnet.  From my googling, I discovered that people had 
similar problems, and based on their success I changed my init scripts. 
  Instead of Xen creating the bridge, I create my own, and label it 
eth0.  I do this before the init scripts configure eth0.

/sbin/ip link set name hw-eth0 dev eth0
/sbin/brctl addbr eth0
/sbin/brctl addif eth0 hw-eth0
/sbin/ip link set up hw-eth0

This works well for me.

I've also tried the routing setup, but I still had problems reaching 
other hosts from the VM.

While I'm able to migrate domains, I am unable to match the times I had 
read in the literature (<1 second).  Any ideas on where I went wrong, or 
areas that I should be looking at?


Thanks,
Christopher



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