HOWTO: Enabling Bridging for Libvirtd QEMU

I need to implement an SNMP setup for Inigo, and I need a number of virtual machines for understanding SNMP and for testing and exploring possible solutions. Before this, I used Xen through virt-manager for my virtualization needs, but recently it feels like its more pain in the ass when I need to install various distro and OSes on the VM to test. Plus, Xen caused some weird problems which I don't really understand (one of it are the Xen bridging, on random, refused to work after reboot). So, I switched to use the normal kernel with Qemu instead to avoid the headache.

Thanks to Jonathan (daMaestro), I got the Qemu bridge working. The howto I followed from watzmann.net does not work for me because of what I believe some missing details for me understand the setup and set it properly.

Creating a Bridge

Lets assume we want to create a bridge called br0, which will be bridged to eth0. The host will be using a static IP 192.168.0.20 on a /24 network, with a gateway 192.168.0.1.

Edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-br0. Change it to be similar to this.


DEVICE=br0
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=192.168.0.20
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
GATEWAY=192.168.0.1
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Bridge


Then, edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 to this.


DEVICE=eth0
HWADDR=$MACADDRESS
ONBOOT=yes
BRIDGE=br0


(Replace $MACADDRESS with the MAC address of your network card.)

Afterward, restart the network `/sbin/service network restart`

From this point, you should be able to select the bridge when you are creating a new VM through virt-manager.

Firewall

You will need to set br0 as a trusted interface through system-config-firewall before you'll be able to use the network.

Yay, now I feel much more comfortable on Qemu.

- Izhar Firdaus -