[TriLUG] XEN bridging with SLES 11

[Jack Hill]

On Wed, 2011-06-29 at 09:14 -0400, Stephen Boyte wrote:
> I wondered if anyone could shed some light on a simple way to pipe in a 10GB
> or even 1GB connection to guest servers on a XEN install of SLES 11.
> Currently, I only see the default drivers and choices for the connections.
> I have a 10GB connection to DOM 0 but only seem to get 100Mbs connection
> through the old Realtek driver.  Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.  If
> it makes any difference my onboard nics use an Emulex driver.
> 
> Regards,
> Stephen

To be clear SLES is the dom0 or domU? What is the other one?

My first thought would be to try running it under paravirtualization
instead of hardware-supported virtualization. The paravirt hardware is
more performant than the emulated hardware. As an added bonus you might
bet better disk performance as well.

One or two years ago I had problems where paravm domU nics came up with
tcp segmentation offload on (or after migrating between hosts). This
drastically cut down on performance, but everything was speedy once I
turned it off. I believe that this has been fixed, but if you're having
problems with your paravm I would look at the output of ethtool -k.

Hope that helps,
Jack