Untangle NIC passthrough / VMbridge

[deepinder27]

I'm trying to use Untangle as a VM on proxmox. I watched some guides on youtube and they mentioned to passthrough the NIC directly to Untangle. However, I'm facing a problem after doing that. When I passthrough the NIC, I am unable to get any connectivity to Proxmox and other VMs. I tried to make linux bridges but they were not successful. At least from what I understand, when the NIC gets passthrough to VM it is not "active" on proxmox itself, hence the linux bridge should not work. Am I missing something? Also, is there any specific advantage to passing through the NIC?

Attached is the pic of my setup depicting the network interfaces:
1. enp4s0f0 and enp4s0f1: NIC Passthrough with two ports.
2. enp7s0: Onboard NIC.

 

[Dunuin]

When I passthrough the NIC, I am unable to get any connectivity to Proxmox and other VMs. I tried to make linux bridges but they were not successful. At least from what I understand, when the NIC gets passthrough to VM it is not "active" on proxmox itself, hence the linux bridge should not work. Am I missing something?

You are right. If you passthrough the NIC your host has no access to that NIC at all so any network configurations using these NICs (like creating bridges) would be useless.

Also, is there any specific advantage to passing through the NIC?

You should get way better performance because there would be no virtualization overhead and you could keep hardware offloading enabled so your CPU isn't utilized that much.

 

[deepinder27]

So, the only way I can give access to proxmox through untangle is to use an external switch. Thank you for clearing this up!

 

[vesalius]

So, the only way I can give access to proxmox through untangle is to use an external switch. Thank you for clearing this up!

It's not the only way. You could add vmbr0/enp7s0 to the untangle VM and utilize that interface for a management vlan

 

[deepinder27]

I was able to achieve what I wanted to. After passing through the NIC to Untangle VM, I also passed vmbr0 to the VM, where I bonded 'Internal' to vmbr0. Then I assigned IP from Untangle to Proxmox thereby solving all my purposes. Thank you guys for your help.

 

[honey_pablo]

Hi - I've been running Untangle on proxmox for a couple of years now using the network passthrough method mentioned above - really great solution for testing new configs and having a nightly snapshot of a fully working Untangle.

Recently bought a small mini pc with 6 intel nics and have swapped to using PCI passthrough so (five of) the cards are absolutely not available to the Proxmox host and have the benefit of showing up in Untangle as the correct hardware type (i.e. it's the Untangle Intel driver being used). Seems equally solid to me - I'm sure someone will be able to tell me if it's more efficient this way - feels like it should be despite PCI passthrough being technically 'not for production' still.

P.