Networking on Alienvault as a HyperV Guest

The information here was compiled while using Alienvault 4.6 and I know that 4.3 required the same steps. If you're using a different version, you may need to take different or additional steps. If you're using a newer version, perhaps this is all sorted out already.


The first issue that comes up with this is that Alienvault does not come with drivers for the Hyper-V network interfaces. Therefore you need to use the legacy NICs available in Hyper-V Alienvault will see, load drivers for, and configure this interface correctly. The legacy adapter shows up as an Intel 21140 or DEC 21140 PCI Fast Ethernet Adapter. This of course rules out a Generation 2 virtual machine, since the legacy adapter is no longer an option in Generation 2 virutal machines. Performance and features of the legacy NIC lag behind that of native NIC, so hopefully the Hyper-V drivers get included in later releases.

The second issue that needs to be addressed is the irqbalance service. According to it's man page, "The purpose of irqbalance is distribute hardware interrupts across processors on a multiprocessor system in order to increase performance." On the surface, it sounds like a good service to have. However, it stops the network adapter(s) from working, so we'll need to disable it. I simply ran "rm /etc/rc*/*irqbalance" and rebooted. However, you may wish to employ a more correct solution. You can read more about irqbalance in a virtual machine here, which includes some commentary from a RedHat engineer.