NIC passthrough with physical router vs virtual NIC

[jack111232]

I am relatively new to Proxmox. I have a proxmox server with 4 physical NICs (two are 10Gbe). On this server there are currently two VMs, one for Nextcloud and one for a Windows Desktop. I use the desktop VM for everyday work.
Would it be better/faster to pass a NIC to every VM and connect them via an external physical router/switch, or should I rely on the virtual network provided by proxmox to connect both VMs? What are the advantages/disadvantages of each solution?
Thanks for your help!

 

[ph0x]

A physical switch will limit you to the speed of the interfaces (1GbE, I guess). The internal networking is solely limited by cpu and io speed, giving you usually a lot more throughput.

 

[jack111232]

A physical switch will limit you to the speed of the interfaces (1GbE, I guess). The internal networking is solely limited by cpu and io speed, giving you usually a lot more throughput.

thanks, i have 10gbe NICs and a 10gbe switch, would internal networking still be faster ?

 

[ph0x]

That depends on your hardware. You can benchmark the throughput with iperf3. I had 9 GBit on a 64bit single board computer, so with decent hardware you can most likely reach more.

 

[jack111232]

Thanks a lot will try asap