Selfhosted @lemmy.world kalpol @lemmy.world 5mo ago

virtualizing PFSense. What else works besides ESXi for virtual networking?

with the demise of ESXi, I am looking for alternatives. Currently I have PfSense virtualized on four physical NICs, a bunch of virtual ones, and it works great. Does Proxmox do this with anything like the ease of ESXi? Any other ideas?

22 comments

Tossing in my vote for Proxmox. I'm running OPNsense as a VM without any issues. I did originally try pfSense, but didn't like it for some reason (I genuinely can't recall what it was).

Either way, Proxmox virtual networking has been relatively easy to learn.
- pfSense, but didn’t like it for some reason
  
  Probably the shitbirds at Netgate put you off it, understandably.
No problem using multiple physical and virtual ports for a pfsense in proxmox
- Admittedly I have not dug too deeply into Proxmox but its learning curve appears kinda steep.
  
  There's multiple guides on virtualizing pfsense in proxmox, but the easiest is to simply pci passthrough the nics you wanna use.
  I do recommend you leave a physical nic for proxmox itself to maintain LAN access to it if your pfsense is down.
  
  its not too bad. i switched from esxi to proxmox about 2 years ago.
  
  i run a virtualized opnsense with 2 nic's passed through and another 2 virt, so it can be done
  
  Proxmox is quite simple. As a former VCP, I find Proxmox more intuitive to use.
  
  If you need specific help with Proxmox and/or ZFS, you might also look at posting on https://www.practicalzfs.com
  
  And +1 for using OPNsense
  
  It's not too different from ESXi, things are just named differently in the webUI.
  
  From my understanding is that Proxmox is one of the more easy platforms to learn. I must say iI never used it personally.
Proxmox is great

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
ESXi	VMWare virtual machine hypervisor
HTTP	Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
IP	Internet Protocol
LTS	Long Term Support software version
LXC	Linux Containers
SSH	Secure Shell for remote terminal access
SSO	Single Sign-On
VPN	Virtual Private Network
ZFS	Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity
nginx	Popular HTTP server

10 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 28 acronyms.

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We've been running KVM on CentOS/Rocky hosts for our VM platforms; seems to work fine for our needs.

I'm not sure how ESXi would differ as I've never used it, but may be an option if you want to roll your own vs proxmox.
Proxmox, TrueNAS, Debian with cockpit etc. really any type 1 hyperviser work's.
Nothing can beat bhyve for PFSence.
I ran it on Hyper-V for many years. Still running OPNsense that way. It manages 4 VLANS, RDNSBL, a metric ass ton of firewall rules, and several VPN clients and gateways, with just 2GB of ram and 4 virtual procs. It works and doesn’t even breathe hard.
As Another Proxmox user - I've been doing well with it. I use these scripts for the LXC's which has been fantastic:

https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/

I also can log into it from the web as it's secured by Authentik, SSO OIDC login when Away from home and need to manage it. Rare! But the option is there! :)
I see a lot of love for proxmox in this thread.

Word of warning from my experience, sometimes PfSense seems to get confused with virtual interfaces. It works flawlessly once it's up and running, but every time I reboot I have to assign interfaces. It will hang until I do so and will not completely come back online until I manually intervene.

22 comments