We conclude having explored the Proxmox VE network model and worked through some configurations for virtual machines.

Along the way, our attention turned once more to virtio paravirtualization drivers—not for storage, as in the prior chapter, but rather for network IO. To briefly reiterate, virtio paravirtualization drivers for KVM-QEMU virtual machines help optimize efficiency by taking some of the sting out of the resource overhead associated with virtualization. Proxmox VE doesn't default to virtio, however; it defaults instead to the option with the greatest compatibility. In the case of vNICs, that default is Intel's E1000 NIC.

In the next chapter, we'll take a somewhat abstracted look at security threats and countermeasures specific to virtual machines, containers, and their hosts. We'll take our first look at the firewall features built in to the Proxmox VE administrative interfaces, and we'll work to realize some of the countermeasures proposed.

That being said, let's harden...