Re: [Hampshire] Buying MAC's for organisation wide VT

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Author: Andy Smith
Date:  
To: hampshire
Subject: Re: [Hampshire] Buying MAC's for organisation wide VT

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Hi Damian,

On Tue, Sep 11, 2007 at 02:18:22PM +0100, Damian Brasher wrote:
> Andy Smith wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 11, 2007 at 01:16:55PM +0100, Damian Brasher wrote:
> >> Andy Smith wrote:
> >> > What's wrong with just making up your own and keeping a local
> >> > registry? MAC addresses don't pass between collision domains which
> >> > for any sizable network is a single VLAN.
> >>
> >> Depends on the size of an organisation: if you had roaming laptops with
> >> VM's then a large organisation would want to have some control if staff
> >> moved between VLAN's.
> >
> > If I had large numbers of staff with laptops and virtual machines
> > then their laptops would be NATting through one virtual machine as
> > it would otherwise be very difficult to get the networking correct
> > for any of the types of connection they may use (wired ethernet,
> > wifi, 3G, dialup). Therefore MAC addresses would not be an issue.
>
> Depending on how they set up their own VM's, it's a very small chance that
> there would be a conflict - I agree.


In a NAT setup there is zero possibility for a MAC conflict as there
is a router in the way (the NAT device).

> >> Creating the wrong kind of traffic on a VLAN might cause problems
> >> with firewalls or old network equipment.
> >
> > Not a MAC issue..
>
> I'm not sure about that, could accidentally enabling the mulitcast bit in
> a MAC cause problems with non mulitcast aware hubs connected on the same
> media segment?


Possibly, but there are lots of things you can do to screw up a VLAN
if you can plug arbitrary devices into it. A prime example being
you can pretend to be the IP of the default gateway.

> The other question is that can you consider a bridge diving media, does a
> software bridge on a VM server constitute a collision domain?


(I may have said collision domain in my first email, if I did then
it was a mistake and I meant broadcast domain)

A bridge can divide a network into multiple collision domains if it
acts similarly to a switch in that it learns which MAC addresses are
available on which ports. A dumb bridge would be more like a hub,
repeating traffic out of every port, and that would obviously not
divide collision domains.

Linux software bridges are smart enough to learn what is on which
port, so I expect VMWare ones would be also (if it doesn't use Linux
bridges internally anyway).

Cheers,
Andy

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