Udev with virtual machines

Technical Knockout

Conclusions

Each of the approaches has its advantages and disadvantages. The workaround for the cloud has proven to be fine for SLES, Ubuntu, VMware, KVM, and hardware blades. Unfortunately, nothing like a worry-free solution exists in the udev environment. Biosdevnames and systemd break with the old conventions.

For systemd, the solution is to modify the rule in conjunction with a helper script. Systemd will probably assert itself with this approach in the next couple of versions of the corresponding distributions. Things will also be exciting in the Ubuntu camp, where the powers that be are apparently sticking with the existing udev rules. However, an admin-friendly approach in which you can assign appropriate and consistent names for your network cards just by editing a configuration file would be a nice thing to have.

Infos

  1. Consistent Network Device Naming in Linux: http://linux.dell.com/files/whitepapers/consistent_network_device_naming_in_linux.pdf
  2. System Management BIOS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_BIOS
  3. Predictable network interface names: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/PredictableNetworkInterfaceNames
  4. RFC: Predictable network: http://www.mail-archive.com/systemd-devel@lists.freedesktop.orghttp:///msg07875.html
  5. udev-builtin-net_id.c: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/plain/src/udev/udev-builtin-net_id.c
  6. Chakra: http://www.chakra-project.org/
  7. Red Hat 5.5 virtual machine NICs bind to different configurations: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2665504

The Author

Martin Braun is a Senior Consultant and DevOps developer in the cloud environment and has been a Linux fan since SUSE Linux 5.3.

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