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Configure Private Networking In vRack

Overview

With vRack, you can interconnect servers in any location worldwide over a private Layer‑2 network. This means servers in Europe can securely communicate with servers in Australia, Singapore, or anywhere else in your global infrastructure.

Behind the scenes, when you add your infrastructure to your vRack, we provision a private VLAN for your account. This allows your servers to communicate over our global backbone while remaining completely isolated from the public internet. So how do you take advantage of this?

First, choose an internal range. You may use 10.0.0.0/16, 192.0.0.0/16 or 172.0.0.0/16. 

Configure Internal Interfaces

After adding a server to your vRack, you’ll notice that a new network interface becomes available. You can view this by running ip a. The interface is usually deployed as eno2, but the exact name depends on the underlying hardware.

4: eno2: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP group default qlen 1000
    link/ether d0:50:99:dc:f3:75 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    altname enp4s0f1
    altname enxd05099dcf375
RHEL 10 / AlmaLinux 10 / RockyLinux 10

In RHEL 10, we use NMCLI, the command‑line utility for NetworkManager, to configure the second interface. As root, check the current network status. You should see that eno2 is listed but currently disconnected.

nmcli device status

To add your second NIC to NetworkManager, use the command below to create a new connection profile. Replace eno2 with the name of your second interface, as shown in ip a, and replace Private_Network with your own network name.

sudo nmcli connection add type ethernet con-name Private_Network ifname eno2

If you check nmcli device status Now, you’ll notice that the connection shows as “connecting”. The next step is to assign an IP address to the connection. Replace Private_Network with the network name you created earlier, and replace 172.0.0.1/24 with your own internal range.

nmcli connection modify Private_Network IPv4.address 172.0.0.1/24

Now set the connection to manual so it does not attempt to obtain an address automatically. Replace Private_Network with the network name you created earlier.

 nmcli connection modify Private_Network IPv4.method manual

Finally, make the configuration persistent across reboots so the connection is restored automatically whenever the server starts. Replace Private_Network with the network name you created earlier,

nmcli connection modify Private_Network connection.autoconnect true

After restarting NetworkManager, you’ll see that your second NIC is now configured with the new internal IP address.

systemctl restart NetworkManager

Repeat this process on your other servers, assigning a unique internal IP address to each one. Your servers will now be able to communicate with each other over the private network you’ve created.

RHEL 8/9 / AlmaLinux 8/9 RockyLinux 8/9

Check ip a for the name of the second interface after you have added your servers to the vRack. Create the following configuration file using the correct interface name from ip a.

nano /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-NETWORK_INTERFACE

Inside the file, paste the following configuration block. Replace 172.0.0.1/24 with your own internal range, and replace eno2 with the name of your second interface.

DEVICE=eno2
BOOTPROTO=static
IPADDR=172.0.0.1/24
NETMASK=NETMASK
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet

Now restart NetworkManager

systemctl restart NetworkManager.service

Repeat this process on your other servers, assigning a unique IP address from your internal range to each one.

Ubuntu 24 / Debian 13

To configure vRack on Debian‑based distributions of 13+, we use Netplan to add and configure the second interface. Open the 50-cloud-init.yaml file and locate the line that begins with version: 2.

nano /etc/netplan/50-cloud-init.yaml

Directly under this line, add the following code block, making sure the indentation is preserved exactly. YAML is indentation‑sensitive, so even a single misplaced space will cause Netplan to fail. Ensure you switch the IP block for your internal range.

   ethernets:
       NETWORK_INTERFACE:
           dhcp4: false
           addresses:
             - 172.0.0.1/24

Save and reload Netplan. 

netplan apply

Repeat this process on your other servers, assigning a unique IP address from your internal range to each one.

Ubuntu 22 / Debian 11

Using nano, open up the current networking file.

/etc/network/interfaces.d/50-cloud-init
Add the following line, replacing INTERFACE_NAME with the name of your second interface and swapping the internal IP range for your own.

auto INTERFACE_NAME
iface INTERFACE_NAME inet static
   address 172.0.0.1/24
   netmask 255.255.255.0

Restart the network, then repeat this process on your other servers, ensuring each one is assigned a unique IP address from your internal range.

systemctl restart networking
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