The network module allows your customers to create private layer 3 networks on layer 2 level. From a technical point of view, these are VXLAN networks managed by the Proxmox SDN (Software Defined Networks) extension.

To test if the Proxmox integration is active, you can go to the settings page. If SDN is not active, you will get a warning here:

If the message is no longer there, you can change the settings. There is not much to do here:

Configuration

Ipam: Ipams are tools for managing IP addresses. If you have added another Ipam in Proxmox under SDN > Controller, you can enter the name here.Caution: If an ipam is deleted, the subnets can no longer be deleted. So it must always be available for the module to work properly. If you don’t need an ipam or don’t want to take the risk, it’s best to just leave the default value “pve” here.(see Proxmox documentation)

Limit per user: Here you can set a limit on how many networks can be created per user.

Participating IPs: The participating IPs are IP addresses in your network over which the private networks should work. In a normal Proxmox setup with one node, it is sufficient to enter only the IP address of the node. In a cluster setup, all IP addresses of the participating nodes must be entered here, separated by a comma.(see Proxmox documentation).

Now you can create your first network. To do this, navigate to “Networks” in the bar and then click on “Create new network”. The following dialogue opens:

The name can be anything and does not follow any guidelines. The module generates a random ID for the network in the background.

In theory, the subnet can be anything that is a valid CIDR. However, if you use address ranges that are on the open internet, it will happen that these otherwise internet addresses are no longer accessible. So you can break the internet on the server. Therefore, there is the advice to only use address ranges from RFC 1918, which are reserved for these purposes.

After the network is created, you can go into the network and add a new device:

Here you enter an IP address from your new network and then select the server/container on which you want to use this IP.

If you have assigned a new address, you will now also see the IP on the server overview: