How do I assign physical NICs to VM?
I've got 8 physical network interfaces on my proxmox host. I want to assign some of them to VMs so that way those VMs fully own chosen network interfaces. How do I go about it?
Mimecast_Comms
Sort by:
Best
Open comment sort options
Best
Top
New
Controversial
Old
Q&A
Easy way: assign "empty" bridges to all the interfaces and assign the bridge to VMs.
Not so easy way: you can pass through PCI to the VM to give it full ownership. You can not split individual network ports, it needs to be the full controller and it needs to be in a separate IOMMU group. Your hardware also needs to support VT-d/AMD-Vi.
Read more here https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Pci_passthrough
I have 2x 4-port network cards, I would want to be able to assign e.g. ports 1 and 2 to VM A and ports 3 and 4 to VM B. I guess that's the empty bridges approach then?
+1 on connecting bridges to single nics and the vm to that bridge.
basically how the main bridge works except the host won't be getting an ip on the other bridges. basically giving that vm exclusive access without too much complexity and pci passthrough.
Why do you want it setup this way? It sounds like more complexity for no real reason.
Performance. Emulated nics are fast, but not as fast as hardware. Plus nics support all kinds of features qemu nics can't because of bridging.
Do you mean PCIE passthrough? You can pass through a physical nic to a vm that cant be used by any other vm. Is this what you mean?
Is each nic connected to a different physical network? If not, you are defeating the purpose of virtualization.
1x Gigabit interface can push 1 Gbps total
8x Gigabit interface could push 8 Gbps total, is that right?
I have been evaluating using Proxmox on my home network for a while now. The question you propose is something I find interesting because I would like to run various software/services on different VLAN networks but on the same physical machine that has multiple NICs. I don’t want to have separate physical boxes sitting within each network. Each physical NIC can be configured to be in a different VLAN on the managed switch. I could have a web server in the DMZ, video surveillance software running on an isolated network, various network monitoring software on the management VLAN, etc.
Also, even if you want to have a physical NIC per VM on the same network, isn’t there still some benefits of using virtualization software since you are still consolidating several physical machines into a single machine? Just curious your thoughts on that. You seemed to indicate that it’s a waste to use one NIC per VM on the same box using dedicated virtualization software such as Proxmox (as opposed to having an OS with VMs bridged to each physical interface? But you are still using virtualization with the VMs?)
You probably don't want that. You want to use a Linux bridge, and you simply tie the physical interface to the Linux bridge.
You can create multiple bridges, and you can assign a different physical interface to each one.