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Accepted
Jordan Eunson
Asked: 2011-09-16 16:01:06 +0800 CST

No Gigabit NIC card in Xen 3.0 CentOS 5.6

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I have a CentOS 5.6 linux host running two Windows Server 2008 R2 VMs in Xen. The problem I'm having is the NIC card in any VM shows up as 100Mbps and not 1000Mbps. I would like to be able to give the VM a gigabit nic card. One of the VMs is a Windows file server and requires at least a gigabit connection to perform well.

tl;dr how do i create a gigabit NIC interface for a xen vm?

xen centos networking vlan bonding

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Step 1.

    Use a better NIC model.

    A recommended one is:

    vif = [ '<your current options>.., model=e1000']

    Step 2. If step 1 doesn't give you enough performance, install the GPLPV drivers.

    Remove the model line and make sure that you don't have an ioemu option

    vif = [ '<your current options without ioemu option>']

    Signed GPLPV drivers are available here: http://wiki.univention.de/index.php?title=Installing-signed-GPLPV-drivers

    For more information on the GPL PV drivers see: http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenWindowsGplPv

    Step 3.

    For a detailed guide of improving network throughput see: http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/Network_Throughput_Guide

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