We have a number of XEN servers all running CentOS or RHEL. The VM's that they run are all required to be on their own VLAN for no other reason than the customer expects them to be. Long story short however, I can't change this right now.

We are also required to have bonding enabled on the interfaces. So to accommodat this we enslave eth1 and eth2 to bond0. We then create a seperate interface called bond0.VLANID where VLANID corresponds to the correct vlan; eg ifcfg-bond0.204

DEVICE=bond0.204
BOOTPROTO=static
ONBOOT=yes
VLAN=yes
BRIDGE=xenvlan204

Bridge to XEN

As you will see, we eventually have to bridge this out to XEN, and we do this by adding another interface called xenvlan204 (in this instance) which contains; ifcfg-xenvlan204

DEVICE=xenvlan204
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=bridge

XEN Vm Config

Finally in our XEN config for each VM, we add

vif = [ "bridge=xenvlan204" ]

This then allows the vm host to access that particular vlan

The Problem

We've noticed a few problems with this setup. One being that we currently create the interfaces manually. Which means if we add more vlan enabled interfaces and bridges we usually have to restart xend which is something I'm not so hot about. Also lower level staff have their heads melted by the number of interfaces and the risk of a mistake occurring is high.

Secondly, it can take sometime for a host to come up if it has a number of vlan taged interfaces.

Thirdly, its just not scaling well on the management aspects

The Question

Is there a better more flexible way to do this (in particular with Xen that ships with centos 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5 as we have to support all three) that leverages either scripting or other solutions to allow an arbitrary amount of interfaces to be created when a vm is instanced.

Your advise and expertise is more that welcomed.