First timer going to colocation

Networking
1

I will be setting up some servers for which I need a fast internet connection and one IPv4 per VM. I’m looking at having ~10 VM’s for now, I’ll be taking them to Hetzner.
This stuff is quite new to me, I’m starting a CCNA course later this year but for the moment I’ve got some questions:

  1. Do I have enough with 1 managed switch to route the traffic & IP addresses to the machines? I run up to 4 VM’s per machine via Proxmox.
  2. Or should I consider something like a router with 1:1 NAT mapping? This seems easiest for me.
  3. Do I need a hardware firewall?

I would like to run as little as possible on the servers themselves so if it makes sense I’d prefer not to run a firewall on the machines that run the VM’s, unless running a firewall on Proxmox uses little resources.

Any recommendations for a hardware firewall in case I’d need one? I’ll have a /28 subnet, 1gbit drop.

Extra question: can anyone point me in the right direction how to learn how to automate setting up a VM from a web interface (user can select an image/template, vm gets created and assigned one of the available IP addresses etc)

2

Previously, when a friend and me setup a few servers in a rack with hurricane electric, we just had a cheapo L2 managed switch with one public and private VLAN (no tagged ports, more for convenience), and a cheapo VPN box for IPMI console. Public IPs / cable coming down the rack was plugged into the public VLAN section of the switch and ports had static IPs. Cheapo firewall we used for VPN was plugged with 2 cables into one public and one private port. It was doing DHCP on the private part. I think we had 8 public IPv4, 5 usable and I don’t remember the IPv6 setup.

1 Like