Proxmox VE – How to Deploy Flowmon Probe with Mirror Port

Proxmox VE – How to Deploy Flowmon Probe with Mirror Port

Many customers today run Flowmon as a virtual appliance on their existing virtualization platform. With changing times and evolving VMware licensing and pricing policies, it’s becoming increasingly important to be prepared for alternatives, such as migrating to Proxmox VE. In this article, we’ll walk through a practical setup of a Flowmon Probe in Proxmox using a dedicated mirror (SPAN) port, step by step.

Configure Dedicated mirror port on PVE host (in my case nic1)

• in the /etc/network/interfaces add these lines 

  • auto vmbr-monitor

  • iface vmbr-monitor inet manual

  • bridge-ports nic1

  • bridge-stp off

  • bridge-fd 0

  • bridge_ageing 0
• and enable the promisc mode on the new network adapted
  • ip link set dev vmbr-monitor promisc on

Create and deploy the Flowmon VM 

• Download the latest Flowmon Probe or Collector (KVM image) 
• Create a new VM in PVE and do not add a disk yet. 
• Upload the flowmon image qcow.2 to the local storage to „import“ 
• Import the disk via SSH to PVE node (where 117 is ID of VM)  

  • cd /var/lib/vz/import

  • qm importdisk 117 Flowmon_Probe_Virtual-disk-0.qcow2 local

• Set boot order to boot from the new disk 
• boot the VM