9.17. VirtualBox VNIC templates for VLANs on Solaris 11 hosts

VirtualBox supports VNIC (Virtual Network Interface) templates for configuring VMs over VLANs.[40] A VirtualBox VNIC template is a VNIC whose name starts with "vboxvnic_template".

Here is an example of how to use a VNIC template to configure a VLAN for VMs. Create a VirtualBox VNIC template, by executing as root:

dladm create-vnic -t -l nge0 -v 23 vboxvnic_template0

This will create a temporary VNIC over interface "nge0" with the VLAN ID 23. To create VNIC templates that are persistent across host reboots, skip the -t parameter in the above command. You may check the current state of links using:

$ dladm show-link
LINK        CLASS     MTU    STATE    BRIDGE     OVER
nge0        phys      1500   up       --         --
nge1        phys      1500   down     --         --
vboxvnic_template0 vnic 1500 up       --         nge0

$ dladm show-vnic
LINK         OVER         SPEED  MACADDRESS        MACADDRTYPE         VID
vboxvnic_template0 nge0   1000   2:8:20:25:12:75   random              23

Once the VNIC template is created, all VMs that need to be part of VLAN 23 over the physical interface "nge0" can use the same VNIC template. This makes managing VMs on VLANs simpler and efficient, as the VLAN details are not stored as part of every VM's configuration but rather picked from the VNIC template which can be modified anytime using dladm. Apart from the VLAN ID, VNIC templates can be created with additional properties such as bandwidth limits, CPU fanout etc. Refer to your Solaris network documentation on how to accomplish this. These additional properties, if any, are also applied to VMs which use the VNIC template.



[40] Support for Crossbow based bridged networking was introduced with VirtualBox 4.1 and requires Solaris 11 build 159 or above.