The Jira issue associated with this design spec is CLOUDSTACK-1043 \ [1\] Wiki Markup
The work is being carried out in branch standalone-nic, staged in a Github repository
https://github.com/siwater/incubator-cloudstack.
...
This design proposes to expose a virtual network interface card (NIC) as a first class object in the CloudStack API. The pattern follows that of the Amazon Elastic Network Interface \ [2\].
...
In CloudStack 4.0 release a virtual NIC is implicitly created when a virtual machine is deployed and connected to a network. Subsequent API changes \ [3\] have been made in the 4.1 release to allow a NIC to be added/removed from a virtual machine after creation.
This design document proposes changes which expose a virtual network interface card (NIC) as a standalone entity in the CloudStack API that may be explicitly created/deleted and attached/detached from a virtual machine.
...
In addition the work will be carried out to modify the implementation of security groups so that they are applied to a virtual NIC only.
Unit tests are provided for the create and delete NIC commands
A collection of integration tests for the create/delete/list/attach/detach NIC commands are provided in the test/integration/smoke folder (see test_standalone_nic.py).
Testing to date has been limited to the XenServer platform.