Business and Management Network Requirements

Business and management networks have the following requirements:

• The networks use IPv6 link-local addressing.
• The speed of business or management networks should be less than or equal to the speed of A-Link networks.
• The networks do not support bonding or VLAN trunking.
• VMs can use IPv4, IPv6, and other Ethernet protocols.
• All business networks can be used for IPv6 host access if your site has SLAAC or DHCPv6 enabled.
• To reach the everRun Availability Console, use biz0:0, which is the IPv4 address that migrates to the primary management PM. Each PM also has its own IPv4 address (ibiz0) on the management network.
• Each PM requires at least one business network (specifically, the management network), with a maximum of 20 business networks.

To ensure that Ethernet traffic flows unobstructed to and from VMs from either PM:

• The switch ports connected to business networks must not filter ARP packets, including gratuitous ARP packets. An everRun system sends gratuitous ARP packets on behalf of guest VMs in order to prompt Ethernet switches to update their port-forwarding tables to direct VM traffic to the appropriate physical Ethernet port on the appropriate everRun PM.
• The switch ports connected to business networks must allow layer2 multicasts (address: 01:E0:09:05:00:02) with ethertype: 0x8807.

• If you configure RHEL or Centos guests to have multiple NICs on same subnet, you may experience guest network connectivity issues due to asymmetric routing. To avoid this problem, modify the /etc/sysctl.conf file on the Protected Virtual Machine (PVM) to contain the following lines, save the file, and reboot the PVM.

  • net.ipv4.conf.default.rp_filter = 2

  • net.ipv4.conf.all.rp_filter = 2

• The switches connected to business networks must not enable any MAC address security features that would disable the movement of a MAC address from one business link to the matching business link on the other PM.

• For optimal failover response, configure any switches connected to your everRun system to have MAC aging timeout values of less than one second.

If these requirements are not met, or if the switch does not properly update its forwarding table when a VM is migrated from one everRun PM to the other, the VM may experience a blackout in which network traffic is not properly directed to and from the VM.

Related Topics

Network Architecture Overview

Business and Management Networks

network-info and network-change-mtu