jrandeck wrote:Does anyone

Home › Forums › jrandeck wrote:Does anyone

January 14, 2011 at 2:32 pm #3002
mikinho
Participant

    [quote=jrandeck]

    Does anyone know how well pfSense or something similar would work running as a virtual machine?   I thought about doing that but as I don’t have dedicated server hardware, I would need to share a NIC between the host OS and the VM (I suppose I could get another NIC if needed) and I didn’t know how well that would work. 

    I know there are preconfigured VMs available for some of the products out there, though.

    If you leave your PC on 24/7 like I generally do anyway, then that would save the extra cost of running another server PC.

    [/quote]

    You will need a minimal of two NICs.  You could technically do it with one if you have everything on a static IP address aside from 1 virtual NIC for the WAN but the performance would suck and be more trouble than it is worth.

    I had pfSense running under Hyper-V for ~1 year before setting up my initial Atom D510 1U system (now an Intel D525).  Since Hyper-V doesn’t officially support *BSD I had to run the virtual network cards in legacy mode but the performance was still better than a Apple Airport Extreme I tested against. I went with Hyper-V since I had a server setup already.  If you are setting up a hypervisor environement just for this use I would suggest VMWare ESX/ESXi.

    I don’t think I would ever use a desktop though.  I wouldn’t want the performance hit of running virtuals on my primary desktop or worry about rebooting and dropping the network connection.  But that really depends on your home setup and if your work or family requires a steady connection.