Centos 5.4 - Setup Virtual XP Desktop on same subnet

One experiment that we have been looking at here at Inlet is to virtualise an XP desktop and make it part of our main network sub-net so that it can communicate and be visible to other network clients. The XEN hypervisor is runnign on a Centos 5.4 installation and the XP installation is fully virtualised to take advantage of the hardware speed of the server.

In this server there is two network cards - eth0, which connects direct to the web and eth1, which connects to the internal subnet. By default when you install XEN on Centos 5.x it will use the default xend-config.sxp file to provide networking details to virtualised clients and domains. To change the behaviour so that the virtualised XP client could participate on the local subnet, we simply changed the following setting in /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp:

From (network-script network-bridge)
To    (network-script 'network-bridge netdev=eth1')

the netdev=eth1 setting above pushes the communications between Hypervisor and virtualised client to the local subnet (eth1 is set to local subnet) so your settings would need to be modified to suit.

The goal of this experiment is to develop a methodology of setting up virtualised clients that can participate on local subnet with existing clients and also longer term to allow thin clients on people's desktops to run a fully virtualised client from the server.