Re: kvm bridge network with systemd-networkd 802.3ad bonding

[Gary Dale <garyndp@gmail.com>]

On 2018-12-29 6:40 p.m., Gary Dale wrote:

I've added a second NIC to a server and am trying to configure the virtual bridge network to work with it.

I configured the network bonding initially as per https://wiki.debian.org/Bonding#Using_systemd-networkd but I couldn't get virt-manager to take bond0 as the bridge device (using the Virtual Machine Manager gui). I eventually go it to accept it by removing the [Network] Address, etc. from my /etc/networkd-systemd/management.network file (which I normally use to specify the bond0 address, etc.) and then reworked my old /etc/network/interfaces file to refer to bond0 instead of eth0.

This seems to bring up bond0 with br0 having the correct static IP, etc.. However it seems somewhat archaic. I think it should be possible to use only systemd-networkd to make this work. Also, I may have some issues with connectivity - initial connections to the virtual machine sometimes fail.

Any suggestions?

OK. It turns out I should have just read more about systemd-networkd. It handles the case easily and seems to work better than any of the suggestions previously made (including the one that I report success with). All I had to do was define the bridge with a couple of files:

br0.netdev contains

[NetDev]
Name=br0
Kind=bridge

br0.network contains

[Match]
Name=bond0

[Network]
Bridge=br0

Then I changed the reference in my network-defining .network file (the one that assigns the addresses) from bond0 to br0.

This is very simple and seems to run the bridge perfectly, with better speed than the macvlan approach I'd tried.