9.2. Stable Device Addresses in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

Prior to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1, the PCI addresses of virtual machine hardware devices were allocated in the order in which the devices were discovered. This meant that if the order in which virtual hardware was discovered changed, the PCI address allocation given to the hardware could also change.

A change in PCI device addresses is particularly detrimental to virtual machines running Windows operating systems. If an important device, like a system hard disk, were to be allocated a different PCI address than the one that Windows was expecting, Windows anti-piracy measures could require a re-activation of the operating system.

Beginning in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1, virtual hardware PCI address allocations are persisted in the ovirt-engine database.

PCI addresses are allocated by QEMU at virtual machine creation time, and reported to VDSM by libvirt. VDSM reports them back to the Manager, where they are stored in the ovirt-engine database.

When a virtual machine is started, the Manager sends VDSM the device address out of the database. VDSM passes them to libvirt which starts the virtual machine using the PCI device addresses that were allocated when the virtual machine was run for the first time.

When a device is removed from a virtual machine, all references to it, including the stable PCI address, are also removed. If a device is added to replace the removed device, it is allocated a PCI address by QEMU, which is unlikely to be the same as the device it replaced.