3.6. Virtual Networking

A virtual guest's connection to any network uses the software network components of the physical host. These software components can be rearranged and reconfigured by using libvirt's virtual network configuration. The host therefore acts as a virtual network switch, which can be configured in a number of different ways to fit the guest's networking needs.

By default, all guests on a single host are connected to the same libvirt virtual network, named default. Guests on this network can make the following connections:

However, if needed, guest interfaces can instead be set to one of the following modes:

For basic outbound-only network access from virtual machines, no additional network setup is usually needed, as the default network is installed along with the libvirt package, and automatically started when the libvirtd service is started. If more advanced functionality is needed, additional networks can be created and configured using either virsh or virt-manager, and the guest XML configuration file can be edited to use one of these new networks.

From the point of view of the guest operating system, a virtual network connection is the same as a normal physical network connection. For further information on configuring networks in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 guests, see the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Deployment Guide.