New to proxmox networking; I want a similar setup to what I had with ESXi

[charltonstanley]

Hello everyone,

I'm new to proxmox and the whole networking setup has me quite confused. I'd like to have the setup that i had on ESXi. On ESXi I have a virtual switch (vswitch0) which is load balanced/redundant with two physical nics. both nics are tagged with the same vlans and both nics are active and plugged in. there is no special config on the physical switch for the two ports other than the multiple vlan tags. Off the virtual switch, i create virtual port groups, and specify the vlan tag on each port group. Then, i create my VMs, and assign the virtual NIC(s) on the VMs to whatever port group/vlan that particular VM needs.

How can I achieve this in proxmox?

Much thanks for your time.
Charlton

 

[mira]

Did you read through the network configuration documentation? https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#sysadmin_network_configuration

It explains different ways to use and set up VLANs.

It seems all you want is to specify a bond for your bridge, and a VLAN on each of the interfaces attached to VMs?
This should be as simple as creating a bond from your physical interfaces. Use that bond as bridge-port for the bridge.
Add NICs to your VMs on that bridge, and select the right VLAN tag there.

If you want to use LACP bond mode, your switch has to support it and has to be configured correctly.

 

[charltonstanley]

Thank you for responding!

i have read the documentation, but have been struggling to get the experience to be like i had it with ESXi. I think it's due to the difference in terminology and that is what is tripping me up.

If i understand what you are saying correctly, it sounds like I would have to configure the vlan for each VM NIC on each VM as opposed to the network already being configured for the correct vlan. In my experience, the latter allows for easier management of VMs and the networks they are supposed to reside on. Is there a way to configure each vlan as its own network?

 

[UdoB]

Off the virtual switch, i create virtual port groups, and specify the vlan tag on each port group. Then, i create my VMs, and assign the virtual NIC(s) on the VMs to whatever port group/vlan that particular VM needs.

Hello,

it seems that there are several different approaches to make use of VLANs. I am doing it the manual/classic way: my handcrafted /etc/network/interfaces defines untagged bridges while the the physical external NIC is "tagged only". This is simply done by specifying the only bridge-port to be one specific single VLAN.

Excerpt for vmbr11 using VLAN tag 11:

iface eno4 inet manual

auto vmbr11
iface vmbr11 inet static
        address 10.11.16.3/16
        bridge-ports eno4.11
        bridge-stp off
        bridge-fd 0

Now I can add a virtual NIC to a guest via vmbr11 and without specifying a VLAN tag in that step. (It would fail to work.)

(Note that in my example vmbr11 has an IP address. This ist not necessary if only guest shall use this bridge.)

Perhaps this helps to understand this approach. May be it is not the optimum - but it works for me


Best regards

 

[mira]

Yes, there are multiple ways.

In this case The second option mentioned in the docs [0] would be the right one for you:

"traditional" VLAN on the Linux bridge: In contrast to the VLAN awareness method, this method is not transparent and creates a VLAN device with associated bridge for each VLAN. That is, creating a guest on VLAN 5 for example, would create two interfaces eno1.5 and vmbr0v5, which would remain until a reboot occurs.

This is what @UdoB described in his post.


[0] https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#sysadmin_network_configuration (3.3.8)