Mastering Proxmox - Third Edition

Virtual Network Interface Cards

A Virtual Network Interface Card (vNIC) is a software-defined representation of a Media Access Control (MAC) interface of physical network interfaces. It is basically a virtual network card for a virtual machine. Multiple vNICs can share a physical network interface of a host node. In a way, networking starts with vNIC when a virtual machine sends data to other virtual machines or networking devices within a virtual environment or physical environment. In the following screenshot, the example virtual machine has a virtual network interface named net0 assigned with the virtio driver and configured with the bridge vmbr0:

The virtio is a Linux kernel driver used to virtualize virtual network interfaces and virtual ...