Having a network bridge allows you to bridge traffic under multiple devices so they can talk natively without using any special routing, iptables/firewall or other trickery.
To create your bridge you need the bridge-utils package for brctl and if you want to do things like bridge VMs that run on a tap device you will need the uml-utilities which provides "tunctl".
1.) Install the utilities to make our bridge
sudo apt-get i........