Proxmox 8.1 Software Defined Networks SDN

Computer Hardware & Server Infrastructure Builds
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Hi Tom and everyone who frequents this forum
I’m looking for some good tutorials for how to configure Proxmox 8.1 Software Defined Networks. I’ve commenced reading up on how to configure this today, but the Proxmox documentation is a little ‘lacking’, and the few Video’s I’ve found on this don’t do well to explain how the new system works (If you’ve done a YT vid on this recently Tom, I’ve not found it yet!)

I’ve no issues configuring users, groups and the full network implementation (LAG, bonds, bridges etc) for PVE 6 & 7, but the whole SDN thing, configuring bonds, bridges via the Zone, VNet and Subnets is a new kettle of fish entirely. Where do you stop configuring the hypervisor and start configuring the data center’s SDN?

I work for a tech company and we have distinct production, dev and test VLANs. I would like to give the Dev team access to PVE 8.1 Dev and Test related VM’s/CT’s and VLAN’s, but don’t want them playing with anything Prod related. SDN looks like it could be a great solution for this, but I’m struggling with a “best practice” method to how to configure it.

Any assistance from those in the know would be greatly appreciated and Tom, if you are planning on doing a PVE 8.1 SDN YT vid, would be awesome!!

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I haven’t dived into the SDN implementation yet, but wanted to mention that the same configurations from PVE 6 and 7 still work just fine with PVE 8 and since they’re baked into Linux, I doubt they’re going anywhere. Nonetheless, SDN is on my list of things to get familiar with this year.

The way I’ve been cordoning off access to assets is with PVE’s Pools feature and it’s permissions system.

There’s definitely a dearth of video how-tos on the new SDN, but here’s one that’s a good start-up guide. I’d keep my eye on the Learn Linux TV channel. I’m sure Jay will get around to this eventually and do a deep dive.

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I don’t use Proxmox so I won’t be creating a video on it.

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Proxmox has a good tutorial and there are a bunch of videos online.

https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-pvesdn.html

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Cheers Tom and totally understandable. Maybe one day I’ll make the conversion to XCP-ng, but not today!

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Thanks Pavlos, your feedback & links are appreciated!

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I found a post on the Proxmox Community Forums which lead me to find the correct point at which you move from configuring the PVE server node to SDN on the Datacenter.

The post → [SOLVED] - Cluster wide networking management with SDN | Proxmox Support Forum

PVE server nodes; configure any bonds, mgmt interfaces with IP and the bridges to interfaces and bonds

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SDN on Datacenter; apply VLAN config and join these to the bridge interfaces on the PVE node.

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Where you stop configuring the PVE node and start configuring the SDN was perplexing and until today I’d not seen any information that discussed the demarkation point with this.

I hope this helps some of the Proxmox users who frequent the Lawrence Systems forums