The Network menu acts as the glue between all virtual machines, nodes, and shared storage systems. Without a proper network interface card (NIC) or virtual NIC (vNIC) and a virtual bridge setup, no communication can take place. A deeper understanding of this menu will allow you to create a very complex web of clusters, nodes, and virtual machines. We will take a closer look at the network components later in this book in Chapter 8, Network of Virtual Networks. The following screenshot shows the node Network menu with some interfaces already configured:
The concept of a virtual network depends on the building blocks of the virtual bridge, virtual NIC, and virtual LAN. Network virtualization is the future of physical networks as server virtualization had been for physical servers. The Proxmox virtual network provides a hardware abstraction layer, making the virtual network much more flexible and compatible.