May 24, 20242 yr Hi all, I got my unRAID set up now with 1 on-board NIC and a dual-NIC PCIe card. The default setting when installing unRAID was a bonded network with all the 3 together. I have made a change like this - Broke the bonding configuration. - Left the on-board as default network with static IP - Configured the first NIC of the dual with DHCP as I wanted to use this for VM only - Left the second NIC of the dual blank as I wanted to passthrough this to a VM for dedicated traffic. Would that be a good set up comparing to the default bonded network? Thank you in advance.
May 24, 20242 yr Community Expert Bonding is usually a bad idea. I don't know why it still is default in UNRAID. People overestimate the power of it. So its good that you have turned if off. Using a NIC for VMs only is possible, but unless your VMs are putting heavy loads on the LAN, the helpful effect is also almost not measurable. You can do it, but remember, you will stress the server twice with it. Every access between VMs and UNRAID has to pass both cards (and the switch). This may slow down things more than it speeds up other connections. But this depends heavily on the usage, so try it out and if it is bad, you can always switch the VM manager back to the main NIC. The 3rd NIC will vanish from UNRAIDs list instantly, once you configure the passthrough. Thats ok, so leaving it blank (or deactivating it) makes no difference later on. I still would recommend deactivating it before. If, by chance, you accidentally turn it back on (for instance, by deleting the VM it is assigned too) it may come to life and fetch herself an (unwanted) config that may lead to problems on the main LAN. If it is deactivated, it will be deactivated then too. But, as I said, just a precaution for the future.
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