What is the best way to provide internet access to guests on a Proxmox VXLAN? Is it:
- One node (host) in the cluster is the default gateway, all traffic is routed through it. Sounds clean and simple but there’s multiple layers of jank to get it working, if it works at all
- Have a guest (lxc or VM) on the VXLAN act as a gateway. Give it two NICs - one on the vnet and another on the hosts bridge (physical lan), route traffic through the second.
My default approach is the first but despite hours of tinkering and forwarding tricks it never works. I’m leaning more to the second but having a dedicated gateway guest seems like a waste of resources - logically the host should be doing it.
And yes, SNAT is enabled 😅
Do you need VXlan? Unless you are doing something really funky, regular vlans should work fine. VXlan is only really useful in very large environments where you want to have layer 2 traffic flow over layer 3 networks. I would strongly recommend that you just stick to regular vlans since they are simple to work with and all you need is a router somewhere on your network to terminate the connection.
Of the options I would say 2 but you forgot option 3, have a hardware router handle it and trunk the ports to the proxmox hosts.
Proxmox is a virtualization solution: let it do its job and run a vm with opnsense.
It is simple both from a virtualization and a networking perspective; your hypervisor is ‘hypervisoring’ and the firewall is firewalling, easier to maintain and debug, no custom thinkering required.
If you are at home go with #1, more fun and lots of discoveries; if you have to pay the bills, go with #2, tested, solid, easier to handoff to your colleagues.
If you are at home go with #1
I’m at home but networking/firewalling does my tits in - #2 for me I think 😅
(me too i did #2 at home…)
I’m always uncomfortable doing #2 anywhere but at home.
For me it depends on the hw on site; if it is properly setup and in an adequate environment i have no issue anywhere.
#2 with opnsense
Do you use that setup? What made you choose it?
i route all incoming traffic through a tp-link vlan switch to openwrt router in an lxc container to vlan dmz in which all public service traffic is
all the public services and openwrt are running in proxmox lxc containers. all public traffic is trapped in the vlan dmz
I would also do #1, and I’d probably make it work (loooong time Linux user and persistent debugger).
#2 is probably simpler, both conceptually and technically. NAT and FW config is self-contained, and there are plenty of docs and how-tos.
Note: I’m not a proxmox user, so there could be some proxmox specific spanners… But I doubt it.
