As a user I would like to ensure I will not run into a MAC address conflict for virtual machines hosted on OpenShift Virtualization with any other virtualization solution on the same network. The MAC address range is managed by KubeMacPool. Kubemacpool works by allocating MACs to kubevirt VMs from a range set when the cluster is installed. Kubemacpool will block the VM creation if it is a duplicate. The MAC address range of the KubeMacPool cannot be specified during the installation of the HCO operator neither can it be modified post-installation.

This leaves users / customers with the following options:

• Have a fitting randomly chosen KubeMacPool in the first place. This is nothing the user can control.
• Manually take care of the MAC addresses provided to OpenShift Virtualization VMs. This option guarantees you non conflicting MAC addresses but comes with an immense overhead especially for large virtualization environments.

Additional resources:

• Docs: Managing MAC address pools
• Docs: Managing MAC address pools for network interfaces (disabling KubeMacPool)