Switching to systemd-networkd for managing your networking interfaces makes things quite a bit simpler over standard networking scripts or NetworkManager.
I talked a bit about systemd’s network device name in my earlier post about systemd-networkd and bonding and I received some questions about how systemd rolls through the possible names of network devices to choose the final name.
There are plenty of guides out there for making ethernet bridges in Linux to support virtual machines using built-in network scripts or NetworkManager.
While using a Dell R720 at work today, we stumbled upon a problem where the predictable network device naming with systemd gave us some unpredictable results.