XenCenter

View and Change Network Properties

Note:

XenCenter YYYY.x.x is currently in preview and is not supported for production use. Note that any future references to production support apply only when XenCenter YYYY.x.x and XenServer 8 go from preview status to general availability.

You can use XenCenter YYYY.x.x to manage your XenServer 8 and Citrix Hypervisor 8.2 CU1 non-production environments. However, to manage your Citrix Hypervisor 8.2 CU1 production environment, use XenCenter 8.2.7. For more information, see the XenCenter 8.2.7 documentation.

You can install XenCenter 8.2.7 and XenCenter YYYY.x.x on the same system. Installing XenCenter YYYY.x.x does not overwrite your XenCenter 8.2.7 installation.

To view a server’s current networking configuration

Select the Networking tab for a server to see all the networks currently configured on the server, with information about each one:

   
Name The name of the network.
Description (Optional) A description of the network.
NIC The physical NIC, NIC bond, or internal virtual network used by the network.
VLAN For external networks, this column shows the virtual LAN (VLAN) tag.
Auto This column shows whether the network is automatically added to any new virtual machines created using the New VM wizard.
Link Status The link status of the network: connected or disconnected.
MAC The MAC address of the network adapter (NIC). This value is a unique identifier for a particular network adapter.
MTU A Maximum Transmission Unit value between 1500–9216 allows the use of jumbo frames.

To change a server’s networking configuration

On the XenCenter Networking tab, select the network and select Properties. In addition to name, description, folder, tags, and custom fields, you can also change various network configuration settings on the Network Settings tab:

Bond mode

This configuration option appears on bonded networks only.

  • Select Active-active to configure an active-active bond. With this bond, traffic is balanced between the bonded NICs. If one NIC within the bond fails, the host server’s network traffic automatically routes over the second NIC.
  • Select Active-passive to configure an active-passive bond, where traffic passes over only one of the bonded NICs. In this mode, the second NIC only becomes active if the active NIC fails, for example, if it loses network connectivity.
  • Select LACP with load balancing based on source MAC address to configure a LACP bond. With this bond, the outgoing NIC is selected based on MAC address of the VM from which the traffic originated. Use this option to balance traffic in an environment where you have several VMs on the same host. This option is not suitable if there are fewer virtual interfaces (VIFs) than NICs: as load balancing is not optimal because the traffic cannot be split across NICs.
  • Select LACP with load balancing based on IP and port of source and destination to configure a LACP bond. This bond uses the source IP address, source port number, destination IP address, and destination port number to allocate the traffic across the NICs. Use this option to balance the traffic in an environment where the number of NICs exceeds the number of VIFs.

Notes:

  • To be able to view the LACP bonding options in XenCenter and to create a LACP bond, configure vSwitch as the network stack. Also, your switches must support the IEEE 802.3ad standard.
  • Active-active and active-passive bond types are available for both the vSwitch and Linux bridge.
  • You can bond either two, three, or four NICs when vSwitch is the network stack, whereas you can only bond two NICs when Linux bridge is the network stack.

For more information, see Configuring NICs.

MTU

To use jumbo frames, set the Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) to any value between 1500–9216.

Automatically add this network to new virtual machines

Select this check box to have the network automatically added to new VMs when they are created using the New VM wizard.

View and Change Network Properties