On Sep 4, 2007, at 8:45 AM, James Carlson wrote: > The question I'm asking here is: "why?" > > Under what circumstances does it make sense to provide this failure > mode for administrators? How does it help rather than hinder?
It provides the user the ability to preserve and enforce the assignment of factory MAC addresses to virtual machines in a consolidated environment. If the administrator specifically asks for a factory MAC address but none are available, then the operation would fail. The (default) automatic mode is also there for the users who don't care if a random address is assigned to the VNIC instead. >> I'm fine for not having a "force" option during the move >> operation. This >> means that if a VNIC was created with a "factory" option, and the >> destination NIC doesn't have a factory MAC address available, then >> the >> move will fail. It also means that if a user explicitly specified a >> factory MAC address slot, the move will fail. > > Unless there's some reason to believe that factory address slot > numbers are allocated in a common way across NICs, I think that moving > a VNIC and preserving the slot number is a sketchy idea. I was not proposing preserving the slot number. The factory slot number after the move could be different. But it will be a factory MAC address if such an address was specifically requested on the source. Nicolas. -- Nicolas Droux - Solaris Core OS - Sun Microsystems, Inc. droux at sun.com - http://blogs.sun.com/droux
