Comment on Virtualizing my router - any experience to share? Pos/cons?
ikidd@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
I run OPNsense on a 2 node proxmox server and have for a few years now. I have HA set up and have had it fail over gracefully when I’ve been away and not even noticed it having failed over for more than a week. If I want to upgrade it, I snapshot it, and if I upgrade the host I live migrate it, and I’ve done this all remotely more than a few times with no issues.
It takes some planning and I’d say you’d want a cluster (at least a pair of nodes) where you can do HA. But I wouldn’t do it any other way at this point.
GameGod@lemmy.ca 21 hours ago
That is pretty sweet. I have a second server I could use for an HA configuration of the router VM. I’ve been meaning to play around with live migrations (KVM) so this could be a cool use case for testing.
ikidd@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
It works well. I have my docker hosts on HA as well because they’re almost as important as the router.
If you just use 2 nodes, you will need a q-device to make quorum if you have one of the nodes down. I have the tiebreaker running on my Proxmox Backup Server shitbox I3.
Proxmox is basically just debian with KVM and a better virt-manager. And it deals with ZFS natively so you can build zpools, which is pretty much necessary if you want snapshotting and replication, which are necessary for HA.
GameGod@lemmy.ca 21 hours ago
I could just use VRRP / keepalived instead, no?
I should try Proxmox, thanks for the suggestion. I set up ZFS recently on my NAS and I regret not learning it earlier. I can see how the snapshotting would make managing VMs easier!
ikidd@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Proxmox uses a voting system to keep cluster integrity.
Check it out, it’s free and does a lot of things out of the box that take a lot of manual work otherwise. And the backup server is stellar. It does take a while to wrap your head around the whole way it does things, but it’s really powerful if you spend the time to deep dive it.