This will be quick one to show just the networking aspect of the home lab. Nothing here is new, and I’ve just taken the most simplistic route to create from a base host running Proxmox and used some dummy interfaces to mimic a VLAN setup.
However, my favorite when it comes to networking is using a VYOS router, however as we aren’t using any complicated BGP or inter site routing here, just another nic on our base Linux proxmox host and add some vlan tags on the second nic which serves the purpose really quick for a lab.
Host Networking
The lab VLANs never touch a physical switch, vmbr1 has no physical port, so all lab traffic stays inside pve which routes and NATs it out through vmbr0 so this is similar to our nested ESX topology we usually use.
Each HVM host gets 8 NICs from base Proxmox.
| Proxmox VM NIC | VLAN | Use |
|---|---|---|
| net0/1 | 1611 | Management |
| net2/3 | 1612 | Live Migration |
| net4/5 | 1619-1632 | Workload traffic |
| nic6 | 1617 | iscsia |
| nic7 | 1618 | iscsib |
The whole router is a few lines of /etc/network/interfaces on the second interface & then give it a reboot so this is how the above config looks like on the base proxmox host.
auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet static
address 192.168.0.106/24
gateway 192.168.0.1
bridge-ports eno1np0
bridge-stp off
bridge-fd 0
auto vmbr1
iface vmbr1 inet manual
bridge-ports none
bridge-stp off
bridge-fd 0
bridge-vlan-aware yes
bridge-vids 2-4094
post-up echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
post-up iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 172.16.0.0/16 -o vmbr0 -j MA SQUERADE
post-down iptables -t nat -D POSTROUTING -s 172.16.0.0/16 -o vmbr0 -j MA SQUERADE
auto vmbr1.1612
iface vmbr1.1612 inet static
address 172.16.12.1/24
auto vmbr1.1613
iface vmbr1.1613 inet static
address 172.16.13.1/24
auto vmbr1.1614
iface vmbr1.1614 inet static
address 172.16.14.1/24
auto vmbr1.1615
iface vmbr1.1615 inet static
address 172.16.15.1/24
auto vmbr1.1616
iface vmbr1.1616 inet static
address 172.16.16.1/24
auto vmbr1.1619
iface vmbr1.1619 inet static
address 172.16.19.1/24
auto vmbr1.1611
iface vmbr1.1611 inet static
address 172.16.11.1/24
source /etc/network/interfaces.d/*
Inside each HVM host
All we need on the host is 4 NICs like this and we need to create bonds inside the host. None of this is new if you’re coming from the vSphere world. A bond or NIC inside hvm-n1 plugs into one VLAN on pve’s vmbr1, the same way a vmk plugs into a port group on a distributed switch.
So let’s spin up our hosts in our next chapter.