This section covers the management of physical network interfaces using the libvirt virInterface class.
The configuration of network interfaces on physical hosts can be examined and modified with methods in the virInterface class. This is useful for setting up the host to share one physical interface between multiple guest domains you want connected directly to the network (briefly - enslave a physical interface to the bridge, then create a tap device for each VM you want to share the interface), as well as for general host network interface management. In addition to physical hardware, the methods can also be used to configure bridges, bonded interfaces, and vlan interfaces.
The
virInterface class is
not used to configure virtual networks (used to conceal the guest domain's interface behind a NAT); virtual networks are instead configured using the
virNetwork class described in
Chapter 6, Virtual Networks.
Each host interface is represented by an instance of the virInterface class and each of these has a single unique identifier:
The name method returns a string unique among all interfaces (active or inactive) on a host. This is the same string used by the operating system to identify the interface (eg: "eth0" or "br1").
Each interface object also has a second, non-unique index that can be duplicated in other interfaces on the same host:
The MACString method returns an ASCII string representation of the MAC address of this interface. Since multiple interfaces can share the same MAC address (for example, in the case of VLANs), this is not a unique identifier. However, it can still be used to search for an interface.
All interfaces configured with libvirt should be considered as persistent, since libvirt is actually changing the host's own persistent configuration data (usually contained in files somewhere under /etc), and not the interface itself.
When a new interface is defined (using the interfaceDefineXML method), or the configuration of an existing interface is changed (again, with interfaceDefineXML method), this configuration will be stored on the host. The live configuration of the interface itself will not be changed until the interface is restarted manually or the host is rebooted.
