This may be a solution in search of a problem.  I recently moved my UnRaid server (v.6.10.3) over to new hardware, and I have two NICs on on the motherboard, plus an expansion card with four more; so I have six total 1 GB NICs (eth0 - eth5).  I was tinkering with the network settings, and they are all now active, with static IPs in my primary LAN (192.168.1.10 - 15).

 

 

On my old HW, things ran ok with one NIC (wasn't running any VMs given the limitations).  My new box is much better, with a quad core processor and 64GB RAM.  

 

My question is:  What can/should I do with these extra NICs?  

 

Idea 1:  Could do a bonded interface on two of them for redundancy.  I could figure this out by RTM.

Idea 2:  I run several Docker images, including Plex, PiHole, and others.  It would be "nice" to set up Docker images to use different NICs speed things up a little*.  Haven't looked into exactly how to do this yet--any tips or pointers on the direction here?  

Idea 3:  I also run a handful of VMs. I can assign these static IPs from the LAN, but they all seem to be using the same NIC (eth0) to get to the network.  How can I change this?

Idea 4:  I have different VLANs on my network, including an IoT network.  I may like to explore Home Assistant (used it a few years ago) but the UnRaid is on the "main" VLAN and doesn't communicate with the IoT VLAN at present.  Is it possible to have the UnRaid server live in two different VLANs?

 

Would appreciate thoughts from the collective brain trust here.

 

*I have the default Docker networks, and can set up containers with br0 and assign static IPs from the LAN.  Have some as bridge and others as 

 

 

Looking for a similar solution, I don't have a managed switch so want to use vlan capabilities of the unraid. Please point to a guide if any which sorts of discuss this.

 

Sam