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Running a OPNsense firewall in a VM? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/selfhosted

30 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I am not overly happy with my current firewall setup and looking into alternatives.

I previously was somewhat OK with OPNsense running on a small APU4, but I would like to upgrade from that and OPNsense feels like it is holding me back with it's convoluted web-ui and (for me at least) FreeBSD strangeness.

I tried setting up IPfire, but I can't get it to work reliably on hardware that runs OPNsense fine.

I thought about doing something custom but I don't really trust myself sufficiently to get the firewall stuff right on first try. Also for things like DHCP and port forwarding a nice easy web GUI is convenient.

So one idea came up to run a normal Linux distro on the firewall hardware and set up OPNsense in a VM on it. That way I guess I could keep a barebones OPNsense around for convenience, but be more flexible on how to use the hardware otherwise.

Am I assuming correctly that if I bind the VM to hardware network interfaces for WAN and LAN respectively it should behave and be similarly secure to a bare metal firewall?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It is more powerful hardware with much higher single thread performance which should help with OPNsense networking; Ultimately to allow more than 1gbit WAN input which my current firewall hardware is incapable off, although that is still in the future.

But I feel like I could utilize this hardware better if it was running something other than OPNsense, thus the idea to make it run it in a VM.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Ah ok. I've done opnsense and pfsense both virtualized in proxmox and on bare metal. I've done the setup both at two work places now and at home. I vastly prefer bare metal. Managing it in a VM is a pain. The nic pass through is fine, but it complicates configuration and troubleshooting. If you're not getting the speeds you want then there's now two systems to troubleshoot instead of one. Additionally, now you need to worry about keeping your hypervisor up and running in addition to the firewall. This makes updates and other maintance more difficult. Hypervisors do provide snapshots, but opnsense is easy enough to back up that it's not really a compelling argument.

My two cents is get the right equipment for the firewall and run bare metal. Having more CPU is great if you want to do intrusion detection, DNS filtering, vpns, etc. on the firewall. Don't feel like you need to hypervisor everything

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Yeah, I did do a test-setup with OPNsense in a VM today and it mostly works. But I see where you are coming from and usually I also prefer setups that are easier to maintain and with less footguns. I guess I'll sleep over it first.