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

• anamethatisnt@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • twei@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    There could be driver issues doing this. I had a bad experience with Emulex NICs under OPNsense, Intel OTOH worked flawlessly. Switched back to virtual interfaces tho, as it works about as good as a physical NIC

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• BlueEther@no.lastname.nz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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

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  • b3an@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Hey! I have been using ESXi about three year now. I have two identical NIC I bought. One for WAN and one for LAN. I also discovered I had to use the onboard LAN port (3rd port!) just to be able to access the web control. (Is that normal?)

    Anyway, I want to move to Proxmox, and then virtualize my OPNSense like I have on ESXi.

    I get so confused by how the adapters should be. Ideally I would love to have the LAN connect to a (dumb) switch, and provide Wi-Fi. But one thing I never tried before is a VLAN to protect the LAN from the Wi-Fi traffic, but still allowing some systems to still work like streaming data from the wired PC on the LAN to the NVIDIA Shield Pro. But then keeping the Alexa/Echo system on a more restricted WiFi.

    Can I do all this? I’m thinking I can, but. The hurdle of learning vlans and configuring the new Proxmox (which I’m pretty damn new to) is a daunting challenge.

    I’m ready to try this though. I have a 4G wireless plus WiFi system to keep the other half happy while I tinker to get it all working.

    Thoughts/Tips? Anyone?

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    • BlueEther@no.lastname.nz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      All doable, you might need a managed or smart switch though

      I have 4 bland at home plus untagged all through proxmox and a smart switch

      • one for wan
      • one for web facing servers
      • one for iot
      • one for guest wifi
      • rest of lab is untagged

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      • b3an@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Notes about the switch. What is tagging? The purpose and where?

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  • TCB13@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    And in about 2 years you’ll switch to LXD/Incus. :P

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    • BlueEther@no.lastname.nz ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I’m currently off work with a broken shoulder, have you just given me a project?

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      • TCB13@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Ahahaha that’s up to you. All best for your shoulder!

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    • tofubl@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Incus looks cool. Have you virtualised a firewall on it? Is it as flexible as proxmox in terms of hardware passthrough options?

      I find zero mentions online of opnsense on incus. 🤔

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      • TCB13@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Yes it does run, but BSD-based VMs running on Linux have their details as usual. This might be what you’re looking for: discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/…/15799

        Since you want to run a firewall/router you can ignore LXD’s networking configuration and use your opnsense to assign addresses and whatnot to your other containers. You can created whatever bridges you might want and vlans on your base system and them assign them to profiles/containers/VMs. For eg. you manually create a cbr0 network bridge using systemd-network and then run lxc profile device add default eth0 nic nictype=bridged parent=cbr0 name=eth0 this will use cbr0 as the default bridge for all machines with the default profile and LXD won’t provide any addressing or touch the network, it will just create an eth0 interface on those machines attached to the bridge. Then your opnsense can be on the same bridge and do DHCP, routing etc.

        When you’re searching around for help, instead of “Incus” you can search for “LXD” as it tend to give you better results. Not sure if you’re aware but LXD was the original project run by Canonical, recently it was forked into Incus (and maintained by the same people who created LXD at Canonical) to keep the project open under the Linux Containers initiative.

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• ikidd@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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 www.practicalzfs.com

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• MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s not too different from ESXi, things are just named differently in the webUI.

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• kylian0087@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  From my understanding is that Proxmox is one of the more easy platforms to learn. I must say iI never used it personally.

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