Conclusion

Some of you are likely thinking yeah, of course six NICs are better than one! But the moral of the story is that it all depends on the traffic. When I went back and looked at what the services running on the other VMs were doing, there wasn't much traffic, and they were managing anyway. Furthermore, I am either using WireGuard, in which case I am locally connected and the speed from my VPN connection to the VM is local, or else I am using Home Assistant or Paperless from its web interface without having WireGuard running, in which case I don't really care if the VPN is going quickly at that moment or not. If I am at the cafe on my VPN and looking at my camera through Home Assistant, which is probably the worst case scenario for me, then there are enough hops that any speed loss from sharing a bond is negated by the latency of that many hops anyway. With all of this in mind, my best bet was to put as many NICs together as possible in balance-alb mode.

Lastly I would say to homelabbers, you've got to test to find out. With testing, I quickly realized I was leaving performance on the table for no good reason. If I were running services that had lots of traffic or perhaps with a half dozen people using my Plex media server, then reserving a single dedicated NIC for the VPN server would have been beneficial, but for the workload my servers are running, bonding all of the connections gives the best results.

Good luck with your homelab, and definitely check out the tteck GitHub page [4] for more on Proxmox helper scripts.

The Author

Adam Dix is a mechanical engineer and Linux enthusiast posing as an English teacher after playing around a bit in sales and marketing. You can check out some of his Linux work at the EdUBudgie Linux website (https://www.edubudgie.com).