Network connections best practices

[EdM]

New to Proxmox and don't have extensive experience with Linux. Have been testing setting up Proxmox for the last month or two but now have a real server to set up. Server has 4 physical network adapters. Can I dedicate say one adapter each to 3 different VM's and have one for Proxmox administration. Or if my switch supports lacp should I use all 4 adapters in a team using lacp. What is best practice and what is configuration?

Thanks

 

[Raymond Burns]

If you are serious about Proxmox, and may have expansion later on, I would separate all 4 networks.
You will probably end up with:

eth0 - vmbr0 - Storage/Cluster Network
eth1 - vmbr1 - Local LAN
eth2 - vmbr2 - Public WAN
eth3 - vmbr3 - Guest WiFi or Optional physical network for anything.

Additional to that, VLANs can be used to have multiple networks on each NIC. So you have that expansion option if your switch supports it. Also, virtual internal networks are free without Physical connections, so you can create as many DMZ as you want.

This is just my opinion, but I'm not professional. I just like talking on the forums.

 

[m.ardito]

yes, I agree.
another option is to use bonding to increase network throughput for VMs, or use failover to increase uptime through redundant network cards

Marco

 

[EdM]

Thanks for the responses. The vm's are all going to be on the same subnet, something like this: vm1-domaincontroller 10.0.0.10/24, vm2-database 10.0.0.11/24, vm3-mail 10.0.0.12/24. How would I configure all 4 nic's for bonding that you mentioned Marco? Understand that I will also need a switch that supports LACP and configure it before configuring proxmox.

Thanks again.

 

[m.ardito]

I personally never done that, but I am sure it could help you
of course you will lose some of the valuable options provided by the setup suggested above by Raymond Burns. You decide.

In general, the options you have should work as defined here:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/bonding.txt (look for the "mode" part)

The options in pve are these (on my 3.1-24):



to get more info, see also
http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Network_Model
(at bottom of that page there's a very old video tutorial on this (pve version 1.x), but the concept is still the same, just a new web gui.

Marco

 

[oakleeman]

Any suggestions for when you want to connect to multiple switches? I have 6 nics in each server and have created 3 bonds & 3 bridges. I'm wanting to run one cable from each bond pair to a different managed switch. I can't create any trunks on the switches as they aren't linked (though they are both connected to my backbone switch) so I'm trying to determine the best bond mode to use. I'm not looking to increase the speed of the network traffic but have more bandwidth available so I'd prefer not to limit myself to active-backup. loadbalance-rr wasn't working as I was getting considerable packet loss when pinging the hosts so now I am trying loadbalance-alb.

 

[mir]

If you have a managed switch go for LACP.