On Sun, Dec 23, 2012 at 11:01 PM, CS DBA <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi All;
>
> 2 questions:
>
> 1) I'm considering using KVM for Virtual Machines in a production
> environment.
>    Good plan?  Any drawbacks? better choices?

It's useful. It's built into the upstream vendor's basic operating
system. It's about as close to bare metal speed as you're going to get
for a reasonable price and investment in architecture. The management
tool, "libvirt" and "virt-manager", are a direct violation of *EVERY
SINGLE ONE* of the open source GUI guidelines described by Eric
Raymond in his essay, "The Luxury of Ignorance", including the
postscript guidelines from me that he added later.

> 2) I've found many guides on the web for setting up the bridged networks but
> most seem incomplete or they do not work

Head on over to
https://wikis.uit.tufts.edu/confluence/display/TUSKpub/Configure+Pair+Bonding+and+Bridges+for+KVM+Hypervisor.
I've recently been working on that project, which is now open source.
You basically have to do it by hand because neither NetworkManager nor
system-config-network acknowledge the existenc of, nor correctly
handle, KVM bridges, pair bonding, or tagged VLAN's if your virtual
hosts may be on different VLAN's.

>     can someone help me understand end 2 end what I should do to create a
> new bridge interface and make it available for KVM's?

See my notes. They were arrived at after some experimentation, some
guidance from groups like this, and the harsh discovery that *the
upstream vendor's default kernel for 6.3 does not work will bonding,
VLAN's, and KVM bridges altogether", and needs to be updated by hook
or by crook before all three can be used together. This drove me nuts,
because I'd installed some machines and moved them to the new tagged
VLAN environment, but could not for the life of me get the full
network configuration working until after I'd updated the kernel.

> Thanks in advance