Building a 3-Node Proxmox Cluster on Hetzner with vSwitch Networking
A complete guide to deploying a production-ready 3-node Proxmox VE cluster on Hetzner dedicated servers using two Hetzner vSwitches — one for private cluster heartbeat and VM traffic, one for public IP connectivity. Covers Hetzner Robot vSwitch provisioning, bridge configuration with correct MTU for VXLAN encapsulation, Proxmox cluster creation with Corosync bound to the private network, PfSense deployment as the cluster-wide VM gateway, and the per-node MAC address ceiling for VM density planning.
Architecture & Prerequisites
Diagram
Hetzner Robot — vSwitch Setup
All Robot, No SSH Everything in this chapter happens in the Hetzner Robot web UI. You're not touc...
Network Configuration on Each Node
Two Bridges, Three Nodes You're adding vmbr_priv and vmbr_pub to each node. The vmbr0 bridge from...
Creating the Proxmox Cluster
One Flag That Makes or Breaks This Everything in this chapter is straightforward except one thing...
Deploying PfSense on the Cluster
Why PfSense Is Part of This Setup The private vSwitch is a flat layer-2 network. VMs can talk to ...
VM Network Setup
Creating a VM on the Private Network With the cluster up and PfSense running, adding a VM that ca...
Why we designed it this way
The cluster makes a few structural choices on purpose: Two vSwitches, not one. One private (clus...
Lessons learned & gotchas
MTU is the one that will haunt you. A vSwitch with VXLAN encapsulation adds overhead to every fr...