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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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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.