21
Running a OPNsense firewall in a VM?
(slrpnk.net)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
21 points (88.9% liked)
Selfhosted
40734 readers
442 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
So you're planning to reuse the same hardware that the firewall is running on now, by installing a hypervisor and then only running opnsense in that?
It is more powerful hardware with much higher single thread performance which should help with OPNsense networking; Ultimately to allow more than 1gbit WAN input which my current firewall hardware is incapable off, although that is still in the future.
But I feel like I could utilize this hardware better if it was running something other than OPNsense, thus the idea to make it run it in a VM.
Ah ok. I've done opnsense and pfsense both virtualized in proxmox and on bare metal. I've done the setup both at two work places now and at home. I vastly prefer bare metal. Managing it in a VM is a pain. The nic pass through is fine, but it complicates configuration and troubleshooting. If you're not getting the speeds you want then there's now two systems to troubleshoot instead of one. Additionally, now you need to worry about keeping your hypervisor up and running in addition to the firewall. This makes updates and other maintance more difficult. Hypervisors do provide snapshots, but opnsense is easy enough to back up that it's not really a compelling argument.
My two cents is get the right equipment for the firewall and run bare metal. Having more CPU is great if you want to do intrusion detection, DNS filtering, vpns, etc. on the firewall. Don't feel like you need to hypervisor everything
Yeah, I did do a test-setup with OPNsense in a VM today and it mostly works. But I see where you are coming from and usually I also prefer setups that are easier to maintain and with less footguns. I guess I'll sleep over it first.