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Running a OPNsense firewall in a VM?
(slrpnk.net)
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this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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Correct.
I did that in my old playground VMware stack. I'll leave you with my cautionary tale (though depending on the complexity of your network, it may not fully apply).
My pfSense (OPNsense didn't exist yet) firewall was a VM on my ESX server. I also had it managing all of my VLANs and firewall rules and everything was connected to distributed vSwitches in vmware.. Everything worked great until I lost power longer than my UPS could hold on and had to shut down.
Shutdown was fine, but the cold start left me in a chicken/egg situation. vSphere couldn't connect to the hypervisors because the firewall wasn't routing to them. I could log into the ESX host directly to start the pfSense VM, but since vSphere wasn't running, the distributed switches weren't up.
The moral is: If you virtualize your core firewall, make sure none of the virtualization layers depend on it. 😆
Thanks for the quick reply.
What about the LAN side: Can I bridge that adapter to the internal network of the VM host somehow to avoid an extra hop to the main switch and back via another network port?
May depend on your hypervisor, but generally yes. Should be able to give the VM a virtual NIC in addition to the two physical ones you bind, and it shouldn't care about the difference when you create a LAN bridge interface.
Depending on your setup/layout, either enable spanning tree or watch out for potential bridge loops, though.