with the demise of ESXi, I am looking for alternatives. Currently I have PfSense virtualized on four physical NICs, a bunch of virtual ones, and it works great. Does Proxmox do this with anything like the ease of ESXi? Any other ideas?

  • tofublEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I have another question, if you don’t mind: I have a debian/incus+opnsense setup now, created bridges for my NICs with systemd-networkd and attached the bridges to the VM like you described. I have the host configured with DHCP on the LAN bridge and ideally (correct me if I’m wrong, please), I’d like the host to not touch the WAN bridge at all (other than creating it and hooking it up to the NIC).

    Here’s the problem: if I don’t configure the bridge on the host with either dhcp or a static IP, the opnsense VM also doesn’t receive an IP on that interface. I have a br0.netdev to set up the bridge, a br0.network to connect the bridge to the NIC, and a wan.network to assign a static IP on br0, otherwise nothing works. (While I’m working on this, I have the WAN port connected to my old LAN, if it makes a difference.)

    My question is: Is my expectation wrong or my setup? Am I mistaken that the host shouldn’t be configured on the WAN interface? Can I solve this by passing the pci device to the VM, and what’s the best practice here?

    Thank you for taking a look! 😊

    • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      Am I mistaken that the host shouldn’t be configured on the WAN interface? Can I solve this by passing the pci device to the VM, and what’s the best practice here?

      Passing the PCI network card / device to the VM would make things more secure as the host won’t be configured / touching the network card exposed to the WAN. Nevertheless passing the card to the VM would make things less flexible and it isn’t required.

      I think there’s something wrong with your setup. One of my machines has a br0 and a setup like yours. 10-enp5s0.network is the physical “WAN” interface:

      root@host10:/etc/systemd/network# cat 10-enp5s0.network
[Match]
Name=enp5s0

[Network]
Bridge=br0 # -> note that we're just saying that enp5s0 belongs to the bridge, no IPs are assigned here.

      root@host10:/etc/systemd/network# cat 11-br0.netdev
[NetDev]
Name=br0
Kind=bridge

      root@host10:/etc/systemd/network# cat 11-br0.network
[Match]
Name=br0

[Network]
DHCP=ipv4 # -> In my case I'm also requesting an IP for my host but this isn't required. If I set it to "no" it will also work.

      Now, I have a profile for “bridged” containers:

      root@host10:/etc/systemd/network# lxc profile show bridged
config:
 (...)
description: Bridged Networking Profile
devices:
  eth0:
    name: eth0
    nictype: bridged
    parent: br0
    type: nic
(...)

      And one of my VMs with this profile:

      root@host10:/etc/systemd/network# lxc config show havm
architecture: x86_64
config:
  image.description: HAVM
  image.os: Debian
(...)
profiles:
- bridged
(...)

      Inside the VM the network is configured like this:

      root@havm:~# cat /etc/systemd/network/10-eth0.network
[Match]
Name=eth0

[Link]
RequiredForOnline=yes

[Network]
DHCP=ipv4

      Can you check if your config is done like this? If so it should work.

      • tofublEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        My config was more or less identical to yours, and that removed some doubt and let me focus on the right part: Without a network config on br0, the host isn’t bringing it up on boot. I thought it had something to do with the interface having an IP, but turns out the following works as well:

        user@edge:/etc/systemd/network$ cat wan0.network
[Match]
Name=br0

[Network]
DHCP=no
LinkLocalAddressing=ipv4

[Link]
RequiredForOnline=no

        Thank you once again!

        • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          10 months ago

          Oh, now I remembered that there’s ActivationPolicy= on [Link] that can be used to control what happens to the interface. At some point I even reported a bug on that feature and vlans.

          I thought it had something to do with the interface having an IP (…) LinkLocalAddressing=ipv4

          I’m not so sure it is about the interface having an IP… I believe your current LinkLocalAddressing=ipv4 is forcing the interface to get up since it has to assign a local IP. Maybe you can set LinkLocalAddressing=no and ActivationPolicy=always-up and see how it goes.