Thank you, that is a very good point, I never thought of that. Just to confirm, best standard practice is for every connection, even as simple as a Nextcloud server accessing an NFS server, to go through the firewall?

Then I could just have one interface per host but use Proxmox host ID as the VLAN so they are all unique. Then, I would make a trunk on the guest OPNsense VM. In that way it is a router on a stick.

I was a bit hesitant to do firewall rules based off of IP addresses, as a compromised host could change its IP address. However, if each host is on its own VLAN, then I could add a firewall rule to only allow through the 1 “legitimate” IP per VLAN. The rules per subnet would still work though.

I feel like I may have to allow a couple CT/VMs to communicate without going through the firewall simply for performance reasons. Has that ever been a concern for you? None of the routing or switching would be hardware accelerated.