Virtual Switching in Solaris with Crossbow VNICs

Virtual NICs, also known as VNICs, are a core components of projectCrossbow. They allow physical NICs to be shared by multiple Zones orvirtual machines such as Xen domains. VNICs appear to the rest of thesystem as regular NICs. VNICs can be assigned a subset of the hardwareresources (interrupts, rings, etc) made available by the underlyinghardware.

In order to provide connectivity between the multiple Zones or virtualmachines sharing a single physical NIC, the VNIC layer also provides adata-path between the VNICs defined on top of the same underlying NIC.The VNICs sharing the same underlying NIC appear to be part of the samesegment, i.e. connected to a same virtual switch. The virtual switch concept also allow fully virtual networks to be be built within a machine.

A couple of days ago I posted a first draft design document describing the concept of virtual switches, how they are implemented by VNICs in Solaris, and how they can be used in practice.

Copyright: This artical is originally posted at http://blogs.sun.com/droux/entry/virtual_switching_in_solaris_with