Network management using a data and a management network

It is a common scenario in large servers to have more than one NIC for purposes demanded by the software to function properly, or for networking reasons. GCP allows a maximum of eight NICs (depending on the instance type) to be attached to an instance with nic0 being the default NIC to which GCP's DHCP server sends a default route and nic1 to nic7 being optional.

In this recipe, we'll create an instance with two NICs with each of the NICs attached to a different network. One network would be a management network to manage the instance and another network, a data network, used to serve data to the public domain.

Getting ready

The following are the initial setup verifications and network creation to be carried out before the recipe can be executed:

1. Create or select a GCP project.
2. Enable billing and enable the default APIs (some APIs such as BigQuery, storage, monitoring, and a few others are enabled automatically).

 

3. We'll create the management...