Homelab: route internal traffic

[dantebarba]

Hi!

I'm guessing this has been asked multiple times but I couldn't find a definitive solution. I'm currently building my workstation with proxmox. The idea is to have MacOS Windows and a bunch of VMs plus some services like SMB. Configuring everything for both Win10 and MacOS was a real nightmare so I started to regret the idea but finally I managed to configure all.
So, to allow MacOS access to Docker I had to create a container just to run docker and then connect MacOS via tcp socket. I started to perform some tests and everything went ok but the only issue that I noticed was a slightly high ping (1-2ms). That was too high for a comm between two vms running on the same host. Basically I realized that all my traffic was going through my wifi extender which is connected via ethernet to the host and not via the host itself. After reading a couple of posts I think I need a custom solution for this but I don't know whats simple/managable.

My network topology is as follows

VM1 192.168.100.3
VM2 192.168.100.5 (vmbr0) ---> Proxmox Host (192.168.100.2) ----> (eth0) ----> (192.168.100.1/24) Tplink wifi extender -----> WAN Modem + Router (192.168.0.1/24) -----> WAN
VM3 192.168.100.4

As I understand I need a virtual router something like PFSense. I'd like to not go down that road, is there another option? If not, could you recommend simple alternatives to PFSense that do not require much configuration?

Thanks

 

[Hannes Laimer]

Hey,

if all VMs are connected to vmbr0 no traffic should go through your adapter. Could you post the output of ip a and ip r? If you unplug eth0, the VMs should still be able to communicate with each other. Generally I don't see why you'd need a dedicated router for your setup.

 

[dantebarba]

Hey,

if all VMs are connected to vmbr0 no traffic should go through your adapter. Could you post the output of ip a and ip r? If you unplug eth0, the VMs should still be able to communicate with each other. Generally I don't see why you'd need a dedicated router for your setup.

Hey thanks for your help. Looks like I had the wrong gateway setup. I tested with the correct one (192.168.100.1) and now it's working I can disconnect the ethernet cable and the VMs still see each other.