Grid nodes must be able to access the Grid Network and, optionally, the Admin and Client Networks. You provide this access by creating mappings that associate the host's physical interface to the virtual interfaces for each grid node. When creating host interfaces, use friendly names to facilitate deployment across all hosts, and to enable migration.

The same interface can be shared between the host and one or more nodes. For example, you might use the same interface for host access and node Admin Network access, to facilitate host and node maintenance. Although the same interface can be shared between the host and individual nodes, all must have different IP addresses. IP addresses cannot be shared between nodes or between the host and any node.

You can use the same host network interface to provide the Grid Network interface for all StorageGRID nodes on the host; you can use a different host network interface for each node; or you can do something in between. However, you would not typically provide the same host network interface as both the Grid and Admin Network interfaces for a single node, or as the Grid Network interface for one node and the Client Network interface for another.

You can complete this task in many ways. For example, if your hosts are virtual machines and you are deploying one or two StorageGRID nodes for each host, you can simply create the correct number of network interfaces in the hypervisor, and use a 1-to-1 mapping. If you are deploying multiple nodes on bare metal hosts for production use, you can leverage the Linux networking stack's support for VLAN and LACP for fault tolerance and bandwidth sharing. The following sections provide detailed approaches for both of these examples. You do not need to use either of these examples; you can use any approach that meets your needs.