Citrix Systems 4.2 3.8.1. Basic Zone Network Traffic Types

Basic Zone Network Traffic Types

type for each network vary depending on whether you are creating a zone with basic networking or

advanced networking.

A physical network is the actual network hardware and wiring in a zone. A zone can have multiple

physical networks. An administrator can:

• Add/Remove/Update physical networks in a zone

• Configure VLANs on the physical network

• Configure a name so the network can be recognized by hypervisors

• Configure the service providers (firewalls, load balancers, etc.) available on a physical network

• Configure the IP addresses trunked to a physical network

• Specify what type of traffic is carried on the physical network, as well as other properties like

network speed

3.8.1. Basic Zone Network Traffic Types

When basic networking is used, there can be only one physical network in the zone. That physical

network carries the following traffic types:

• Guest. When end users run VMs, they generate guest traffic. The guest VMs communicate with

each other over a network that can be referred to as the guest network. Each pod in a basic zone

is a broadcast domain, and therefore each pod has a different IP range for the guest network. The

administrator must configure the IP range for each pod.

• Management. When CloudPlatform’s internal resources communicate with each other, they

generate management traffic. This includes communication between hosts, system VMs (VMs

used by CloudPlatform to perform various tasks in the cloud), and any other component that

communicates directly with the CloudPlatform Management Server. You must configure the IP

range for the system VMs to use.

Note

We strongly recommend the use of separate NICs for management traffic and guest traffic.

• Public. Public traffic is generated when VMs in the cloud access the Internet. Publicly accessible IPs

must be allocated for this purpose. End users can use the CloudPlatform UI to acquire these IPs

to implement NAT between their guest network and the public network, as described in Acquiring

a New IP Address. Public traffic is generated only in EIP-enabled basic zones. For information on

Elastic IP, see Section 16.18, “About Elastic IP”.

• Storage. Traffic such as VM templates and snapshots, which is sent between the secondary storage

VM and secondary storage servers. CloudPlatform uses a separate Network Interface Controller

(NIC) named storage NIC for storage network traffic. Use of a storage NIC that always operates on

a high bandwidth network allows fast template and snapshot copying. You must configure the IP

range to use for the storage network.

In a basic network, configuring the physical network is fairly straightforward. In most cases, you only

need to configure one guest network to carry traffic that is generated by guest VMs. If you use a

NetScaler load balancer and enable its elastic IP and elastic load balancing (EIP and ELB) features,