Re: [Xen-users] IPV6 Details on Xen Hypervisor

[Michael South <msouth@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On May 6, 2011, at 2:59, "Varshney, Chamanesh Mohan (STSD)" 
<chamanesh-mohan.varshney@xxxxxx> wrote:

> 
> Hi Experts,
> 
> Our product supports Xen hypervisor on RHEL and SUSE in our environment. Now 
> we are going to support IPV6 support for all hypervisors.
> 
> Can you please provide me details for Xen related to IPv6 support.I am 
> expecting pointers on 
> 
> - Whether Xen supports ipv6 
> - Whether Protocol(like SSH etc) used in communication (North/south) supports 
> IPv6.
> 
> 
> Please provide me pointers on the details of IPv6 on Xen.
> 
> Regards,
> Chamanesh
To be pedantic:

- The hypervisor does not support _any_ networking; its job is to cordinate 
low-level access to CPU and memory, and to pass hardware I/O requests to the 
"Dom0" guest OS. It's the Dom0 and DomU guest OSes which do all of the 
networking, so it depends on what you use and configure.

- For performance, there are special "network card" drivers for domU's that 
communicate with back-end drivers running in the dom0. I believe there are 
several varieties of those you can use, but also believe they all operate down 
at the Ethernet frame level. Regardless, all of them will support IPv6.

- Most Xen documentation, as well as configuration generation tools, assume 
that you want to use the Xen version of these special drivers ("VIF"), and have 
the dom0 be a layer-2 (Ethernet frame) bridge between the domUs and the 
physical LAN cards.

- But there are lots of ways you could set it up. It's even possible to have no 
networking stack at all on the domU; you could use PCI pass-through and have 
the dom0 directly talk to the card. Or, you could configure the dom0 as an 
IPv4-IPv6 bridge, and have one or more domUs as IPv4 only. Or put IPv6 
tunneling in a domU, and not bother with v6 on the dom0. Or have a domU serve 
as the layer-3 (IP level) router for other guests, or...

- Higher level protocols, such as SSH, are completely handled by the domU or 
dom0 you are talking to, and have nothing to do with Xen.

--
Michael South
msouth@xxxxxxxxxx


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