My OPNsense setup is on bare metal. It’s a Sophos SG135 rev 2 with 6GB of RAM and a 64GB NVme SSD.

It can be upgraded to 16GB, but isn’t nice for my set up.

I don’t use Proxmox, but I do make extensive use of ZFS across most of my entire homelab.

My NAS/Media server has 48T of spinning SAS3 drives, runs FreeBSD 15.1, and has a BhyVE VM running Alpine Linux and docker for the 1 or 2 services I use that simply won’t run easily on FreeBSD.

I run most of the rest of my services in jails on that host, jails are what linux’s entire container subsystem is based on, having been around for 26 years now. Yes, FreeBSD’s jail system was introduced in 2000.

I have a raspi 5 running rasbian, with Adguard Home, and audiomuse-ai on it.

And a Lenovo M700 Tiny running Home Assistant.

Tying it all together is a managed brocade/ruckus switch in layer 3 routing mode, handling all routing, VLANs, subnets, etc…

I had a Linux box with two 10Mbps NICs in it in the mid to early 2000s doing NAT so I could share the cable modem connection to my wife’s computer back when you were only allowed to have a single machine connected to the Internet at home.

I say all that to lay out my experience level.

With all that said, you can virtualize your primary router if you like. Personally, I’d rather that system critical piece of equipment be fully isolated from any possible virtualization shenanigans.

Not to mention what happens when you fiddle with your Proxmox setup too much and oops, you have no Internet now.

What happens when your main network goes down, and the only way you can access that Proxmox machine is over that network?