I am on a Debian upgraded from 7.11 to 8.5, so the xen package is upgraded from 4.1 to 4.4.

I do not know much about networks, but when I see a diagram like this (taken from the [Xen Networking](http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_Networking) wiki page), I expect to be able to ping 198.51.100.27 with `ping -I xenbr0 198.51.100.27`, and vice versa from the virtual machine `ping 198.51.100.1`.
[![](https://i.stack.imgur.com/L2ehu.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/L2ehu.png)

However, this is not the case. I set up a clean `xenbr0` with

```
# brctl addbr xenbr0
# ifconfig xenbr0 192.168.12.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

```

and in the HVM configuration file

```
vif=["mac=11:22:33:44:55:66, ip='192.168.12.2', bridge=xenbr0"]

```

After I start the VM with `xl create`, this is the output from `brctl show`:

```
bridge name     bridge id               STP enabled     interfaces
xenbr0          8000.feffffffffff       no              vif3.0
                                                        vif3.0-emu

```

I connect to the VM with SPICE and configure it as shown below:

[![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/izWG4.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/izWG4.png)

And since I am only trying to ping the default gateway I assume no name resolving will take place.

With this setup, `ping 192.168.12.2 -I xenbr0` on the dom0 results in

```
PING 192.168.12.2 (192.168.12.2) from 192.168.12.1 xenbr0: 56(84) bytes of data.
From 192.168.12.1 icmp_seq=1 Destination Host Unreachable

```

and from the Windows VM, `ping 192.168.12.1` from `cmd` has the output

```
Pinging 192.168.12.1 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 192.168.12.2: Destination host unreachable.

```

which suggests the machines have no idea about how to reach each other. Aren't they supposed to be linked by `xl create`? Why does this happen?