If you are setting up VMs using libvirt then it’s a good idea to change the address of the virtual network to something other than the default. Why? Because if you don’t, and you create a guest which itself starts up libvirt and uses NetworkManager then at least some of the time your VM will start up with its networking hosed.
If the host is using the default network (192.168.122.0/24) and the guests also want to use that network then there is a race between NetworkManager bringing up eth0 and libvirt bringing up virbr0. libvirt checks for existing interfaces using the network it is configured for before starting up virbr0, so if NetworkManager brings up eth0 first then virbr0 will not be set up on the guest and everything will be fine. But, if eth0 is not set up by the time libvirt runs the check, then virbr0 will take 192.168.122.0/24, then eth0 will come up on 192.168.122.something, and you’ll have a VM with two separate interfaces connected to two separate networks that both have the same address range… and it won’t work!
The easy way to solve this is to not install libvirt on the guest, but you may not be able to change this until after the guest is running, and if libvirt starts up during a guest’s installer then you may need to complete parts of the installation with no networking. This may or may not be ok for you and your OS. I’m using VMs to set up clean test environments for GDB, and at the moment I’m setting up three or four new “machines” every day (and throwing them away when I’m done) so I want the process as streamlined as possible. If you only occasionally set up new VMs then some extra tasks during the installation may not be a problem, but it is pretty simple to change the network on the host and you only have to do it once:
- As root, run
virsh net-edit default - Change every occurence of
192.168.122to something else - Stop any running guests
- Run
virsh net-destroy default - Run
virsh net-start default
It’s a shame this can’t be fixed more conclusively elsewhere, but NetworkManager brings up the interfaces asynchronously at boot time which makes it impossible to definitively schedule libvirt’s startup to happen after NetworkManager.
Thank you Laine Stump for helping me out with this.
