KVM for VyOS - need help with interfaces on linux

General questions
1

Hello VyOS family!
I am new to VyOS, and a fairly new linux user too, but I have spent a lot of time in the IT space, and I can usually figure things out. However, I haven’t messed with Vm’s recently, and I have some questions about KVM and VyOS.

Basic Setup: I have installed Void Linux on a Protectli 6 port Vault. I’ve also installed kvm, virt-manager etc… so I have a working hypervisor.

Questions;

  1. Is there a nifty setup guide somewhere for all the good configuration tweaks for KVM when hosting VyOS?

  2. How do I add the physical interfaces to KVM? I have one that will be my PPPOE sub, and one that will be my internal.

  3. What is the best way to add the interfaces to the VM once I have them added in KVM? I certainly don’t want to NAT via the hypervisor, so I think I want bridging, or macvtap?

Any other gotchas I need to know about when setting up the networking pieces?

Thanks in advance!

2

You want to use bridging or macvtap for your network interfaces. I did a little benchmarking and in my situation bridges were faster than macvtap. I don’t know if that’s always going to be true though. There’s also iov if your hardware supports it. As far as setting them up, you can use netplan, ifupdown or the KVM virt utilities.

As far as configuring the VM goes, the GUI, virt-manager, is the easiest way to do it, but there is the virt-* command line utilities as well as virsh, and maybe some other ways besides those 3.

3

Thanks for the reply!

I’ve decided to stay bare metal with vyos. Since I don’t understand the complexities of how hypervisors handle layer 2/3 stuff, I’d rather not open up a whole bunch of attack vectors on accident.

Loving VyOS thus far!