Vlans

Every homelab guide eventually tells you to “get a managed switch,” usually without saying why, or which one, or what happens if you buy the wrong one. This site has already covered when 10GbE is worth the upgrade and how to configure VLANs, bridges, and bonding once you’re inside Proxmox. This article is the piece that comes before both of those: picking the actual switch hardware sitting between your gear, the decision that either makes everything downstream easy or makes you fight your network for the next three years. ...

Proxmox sets up a single bridge during install, vmbr0, hands every VM and container a virtual NIC on it, and most homelabs never touch networking again after that. That’s fine right up until you want to keep your NAS traffic off the same broadcast domain as a VM you don’t fully trust, or you add a second NIC and aren’t sure whether to bond it or split it out, or you’re staring at a VLAN dropdown in the VM hardware tab with no idea what happens if you fill it in wrong. None of this is complicated once you see the shape of it, but Proxmox’s networking config is also one of the few places where a bad change locks you out of the box that’s hosting the config, so it’s worth understanding before you’re mid-edit over SSH. ...