Advanced network setup

Renting a server in a datacenter usually gets you one IP address. You should not bridge your local VM traffic together with the physical Ethernet uplink port. Instead, setup a bridge only for the Virtual Machines, and provide them with Internet through NAT just like your plastic ADSL router at home.

A bridge to link TAP interfaces

Instead of placing MicroVMs directly on a LAN, one can also use a TAP interface to get a virtual Ethernet interface on the host. Although it is possible to assign individual IP configuration to these individual interfaces, let us avoid the additional configuration effort and create a bridge instead:

systemd.network = {
  netdevs."10-microvm".netdevConfig = {
    Kind = "bridge";
    Name = "microvm";
  };
  networks."10-microvm" = {
    matchConfig.Name = "microvm";
    networkConfig = {
      DHCPServer = true;
      IPv6SendRA = true;
    };
    addresses = [ {
      addressConfig.Address = "10.0.0.1/24";
    } {
      addressConfig.Address = "fd12:3456:789a::1/64";
    } ];
    ipv6Prefixes = [ {
      ipv6PrefixConfig.Prefix = "fd12:3456:789a::/64";
    } ];
  };
};

This configuration will hand out IP addresses to clients on the bridge. In practise, better leave out the DHCP server and its state by opting for declarative, versioned configuration instead.

Last, the TAP interfaces of MicroVMs shall be attached to this central bridge. Make sure your matchConfig matches just the interfaces you want!

systemd.network = {
  networks."11-microvm" = {
    matchConfig.Name = "vm-*";
    # Attach to the bridge that was configured above
    networkConfig.Bridge = "microvm";
  };
};

Provide Internet Access with NAT

IPv4 addresses are exhausted. It is a very common case that you get one public IPv4 address for your machine. The solution is to route your internal virtual machines with Network Address Translation.

You might not get a dedicated /64 IPv6 prefix to route to your MicroVMs. NAT works for this address family, too!

networking.nat = {
  enable = true;
  enableIPv6 = true;
  # Change this to the interface with upstream Internet access
  externalInterface = "eth0";
  internalInterfaces = [ "microvm" ];
};

Check out networking.nat.forwardPorts to make your MicroVM's services available to networks outside your host!

Port forwarding

Isolating your public Internet services is a great use-case for virtualization. But how does traffic get to you when your MicroVMs have private IP addresses behind NAT?

NixOS has got you covered with the networking.nat.forwardPorts option! This example forwards TCP ports 80 (HTTP) and 443 (HTTPS) to other hosts:

networking.nat = {
  enable = true;
  forwardPorts = [ {
    proto = "tcp";
    sourcePort = 80;
    destination = my-addresses.http-reverse-proxy.ip4;
  } {
    proto = "tcp";
    sourcePort = 443;
    destination = my-addresses.https-reverse-proxy.ip4;
  } ];
};