Duplicate a clients network @home

[andersostling56]

Hi
Potential OVS user here, have decent knowledge in IP networking but need advice before I invest too much time and effort in setting up OVS.
I have a client who's network is 10.0.2.0/24 and I am responsible for managing a bunch of VM's running in that network. My home office is using 10.0.64.0/24, and my ambition is to have copies of my client's VM running in order to test and verify stuff. Long-term I would also like to prep VM's in my home office network and then simply move them to the client once they are complete (and without re-configure network parameters). The systems are a mix of Linux and Windows VM's. Linux VM's are easy to migrate/change IP, but the Windows servers not so easy IMO.

So my plan is to setup a VM host where I can emulate the client's network using SDN like OVS, *and* have connectivity to my own network. Would OVS be a good candidate for both switching 10.0.2.0 *and* route traffic to 10.0.64.0? If so, should I have a dedicated server (VM or physical) for OVS, or would it be easier to have the VM host as OVS system? I use KVM/QEMU for the virtual systems, and today I uses host bridges to connect the different VM's with each other.

While waiting for insightsful answers, I will continue to read the excellent documentation!

 

[aaron]

We are talking about this running on Proxmox Virtual Environment servers right?

OVS is not needed. You can solve this with normal Linux Bridges.

The basic step you will need is to create a new bridge without a physical bridge port. This way you will have an internal virtual switch. The VMs for your customer will use this bridge.

There are a few ways to set up the connection between that internal "customer" network and the rest of your network.

You could use the PVE host as router directly. For this you need to define an IP address on the vmbr interface in PVE which will be the gateway address for the customer VMs. You then have to enable IPv4 forwarding on the PVE node. Similar to the routed network setup described in our documentation (https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#_routed_configuration), except that you will most likely have 2 vmbr interfaces instead of the eno1 and vmbr0.

You could also create a dedicated router VM which has two NICs attached to both vmbr interfaces.

Whichever way you choose, from your network you need to set an additional route so that requests to the customer network are routed to either the PVE node or the route VM in order to be able to access it.