29.4. What to do if the guest operating system has been booted with virt-manager
or virsh
As mentioned in the installation notes, a guest operating system with network para-virtualized drivers installed must be started using the “# xm create GuestName
” command. You can only use other methods for starting the guest in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2.
If the guest operating system has been booted using the virt-manager
(the GUI tool) or virsh
(the command line application) interface the boot process will detect the “new” old Realtek card. This due to the fact libvirt
, as the underlying API to virt-manager
and virsh
, will always add type=ioemu
to the networking section followed by prompting the systems administrator to reconfigure networking inside the guest. In the event of the guest operating system has booted all the way to multi-user mode you will detect that there is no networking active as the backend and frontend drivers are not connected properly.
To fix this issue, shut down the guest and boot it using “virsh start
”. During the boot process kudzu
(the hardware detection process) will detect the “old” Realtek card. Simply select “” to delete the Realtek card from the guest operating system. The guest should continue to boot and configure the network interfaces correctly.
You can identify if your guest has been booted with virt-manager
, virsh
or “xm create
” using the command “# xm list –long YourGuestName
”
In the screenshot below you can see the entry “ioemu
” highlighted in the “device vif
” (networking) section. This would mean the guest was booted with virt-manager
or virsh
and networking is not configured correctly, that is, without the para-virtualized network driver.
In the screenshot below you can see there is no “type ioemu
” entry in the “device vif
” section so you can safely assume the guest has been booted with “xm create YourGuestName
”. This means networking is configured to use the para-virtualized network driver.