Citrix Systems 6 manual Configuring a dedicated storage NIC, Adding NIC bonds to an existing pool

•Use the host-listcommand to find the UUID of the host being configured:

xe host-list

Adding NIC bonds to an existing pool

Warning:

Do not attempt to create network bonds while HA is enabled. The process of bond creation disturbs the in-progress HA heartbeating and causes hosts to self-fence (shut themselves down); subsequently they will likely fail to reboot properly and you will need to run the host- emergency-ha-disablecommand to recover them.

Note:

If you are not using XenCenter for NIC bonding, the quickest way to create pool-wide NIC bonds is to create the bond on the master, and then restart the other pool members. Alternately you can use the service xapi restart command. This causes the bond and VLAN settings on the master to be inherited by each host. The primary management interface of each host must, however, be manually reconfigured.

Follow the procedure in previous sections to create a NIC Bond, see the section called “Adding NIC bonds to new resource pools”.

Configuring a dedicated storage NIC

You can use either XenCenter or the xe CLI to assign a NIC an IP address and dedicate it to a specific function, such as storage traffic. When you configure a NIC with an IP address, you do so by creating a management interface. IP-enabled NICs are referred to collectively as management interfaces. (The IP-enabled NIC XenServer used for management is a type of management interface known as the primary management interface.)

When you want to dedicate a management interface for a specific purpose, you must ensure the appropriate network configuration is in place to ensure the NIC is used only for the desired traffic. For example, to dedicate a NIC to storage traffic, the NIC, storage target, switch, and/or VLAN must be configured so that the target is only accessible over the assigned NIC. If your physical and IP configuration do not limit the traffic that can be sent across the storage management interface, it is possible for other traffic, such as management traffic, to be sent across the storage NIC.

Note:

When selecting a NIC to configure as a management interface for use with iSCSI or NFS SRs, ensure that the dedicated NIC uses a separate IP subnet that is not routable from the primary management interface. If this is not enforced, then storage traffic may be directed over the main primary management interface after a host reboot, due to the order in which network interfaces are initialized.

To assign NIC functions using the xe CLI

1.Ensure that the PIF is on a separate subnet, or routing is configured to suit your network topology in order to force the desired traffic over the selected PIF.

2.Setup an IP configuration for the PIF, adding appropriate values for the mode parameter and if using static IP addressing the IP, netmask, gateway, and DNS parameters:

xe pif-reconfigure-ip mode=<DHCP Static> uuid=<pif-uuid>

3.Set the PIF's disallow-unplug parameter to true:

xe pif-param-set disallow-unplug=true uuid=<pif-uuid>

xe pif-param-set other-config:management_purpose="Storage" uuid=<pif-uuid>

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