Proxmox and OPNsense

[spetrillo]

Hello all,

I have a Proxmox server that has an onboard Intel NIC and a 4 port Intel I350 PCI card. I have two 2 port laggs setup on the I350 PCI card. VMBR0(Bond0) is set to vlans 1, 10, and 12. VMBR1(Bond1) is set to vlans 20 and 30. The onboard NIC is VMBR2 and has no vlan assigned. For my OPNsense setup I was planning on 6 virtual interfaces, 1 for each vlan(1,10,12,20,30) and the onboard NIC going to the WAN.

My question has to do with PCI passthrough or not. If I were to passthrough the NICs does that impact other VMs I have running? Is there any performance gained from PCI passthrough vs virtual interfaces? I am just looking to understand the difference in the approaches before I go down one path and find out the other path is better.

Thanks,
Steve

 

[pille99]

its a good question. and lets hear from one of the proxmox team.
what i know: proxmox is the fastes hypervisior with 99.9 % the hardware is utilized. (esx is up to 30 % slower).
i dont think you will gain much performance wise, its more, my guess, you dont maintain the NIC per proxmox anymore rather with opnsense.
but its all just a guess

 

[Mario Rossi]

Good morning, I'll add to the question.
I have an XL710 quad and a realtek 2.5g integrated.

I'm running Proxmox 8.1.4 and have a symmetrical 1G fiber connection managed by OPNsense 24.1.7_4.

I would like to make the most of the bandwidth and reduce the wan latency as much as possible. Also reduce CPU usage for networking tasks that the XL710's CPU might perform.

Currently the NICs are all shared with the VMs via bridges.
I can use both the card integrated into the motherboard and one of the XL710 ports as WAN.

I already have all passthrough features enabled and successfully switch the SATA controller to TrueNAS.