Beginning with KVM-72, you now have the option of using Virtual Distributed Ethernet (VDE) natively within KVM. This support was added as a result of the last merge with the qemu-svn tree. I’ll just outline the basics that is needed to get vde running natively with KVM without going into details of usage.

Enable support in your Configure script

Before you can enable VDE support you must have VDE libraries and header files installed on your system. I won’t cover the details of building the libraries and installing the header files in this post as I just wanted you to be aware of the new VDE options beginning with KVM-72.

Enabling native vde support involves adding the –-enable-vde option to your configure script when compiling qemu/kvm as follows:

./configure –-enable-vde 

If you don’t have vde libraries and header files installed you will see the following message.

Error: VDE check failed
Make sure to have the VDE libs and headers installed.

If you do have the required VDE libraries and header files installed and your compilation finished without any issues you can start using vde commands with kvm natively.

Using VDE commands with KVM

Assuming that your compilation of vde with KVM went well as described in the previous section, you can start using vde options with your kvm install. The syntax for the vde command switches are

qemu-system-x86_64 -net vde[,vlan=n][,sock=socketpath][,port=n][,group=groupname][,mode=octalmode] ….

Summary

Virtual Distributed Ethernet allows for greater flexibility compared to other modes of networking when configuring networking for your KVM virtual machines. Now that qemu/kvm is supporting it natively it will probably become more popular for network configurations. I was not able to find any packages for my Fedora 9 host but I think eventually the more popular linux distributions may consider adding packages as VDE may in fact become very popular.

Feel free to post comments on this topic. Did you have VDE packages available for your linux distribution?

Update

 See post here for compiling and installing vde libraries