2

My understanding is that as of Xenserver 6.5 and earlier versions, you can only have 7 virtual network adapters per VM. Is there any known (probably unsupported) way around this limitation?

My use case is that we are setting up a NIDS, and instead of spinning up another VM for the rest of our VLANs, I would like to add another couple of adapters to the existing one, though this would put us at 9 necessary VLANs that this VM needs to access.

codewario
  • 548
  • 3
  • 16
  • 33

1 Answers1

3

Every template in XenServer has a "hint" about max number of VIFs. This only restricts XenCenter GUI, and you can easily add more NICs from command line. See xe help vif-create.

You can also change a template. Templates are internally tar files, so they can be accessed easily. Look for allowed-VIF-devices parameter in XML file.

sam_pan_mariusz
  • 2,053
  • 1
  • 12
  • 15
  • Thanks. I've been doing a bit of research about it as well and I've read and heard from other team members that going over the limit is bad, but with little reasoning and I can't find any documentation stating that going over the 7 NIC maximum per guest is bad. Do you have any insight on this? – codewario Jul 24 '15 at 18:58
  • I never ran into any problem with VIFs > 7 configurations. I've used them on production in HVM mode running FreeBSD (pfSense) and likely on other test VMs. IIRC there's a hard limit of 31 VIFs per VM in Xapi. – sam_pan_mariusz Jul 24 '15 at 21:06