Homelab

371 readers

9 users here now

Rules

Be Civil.
Post about your homelab, discussion of your homelab, questions you may have, or general discussion about transition your skill from the homelab to the workplace.
No memes or potato images.
We love detailed homelab builds, especially network diagrams!
Report any posts that you feel should be brought to our attention.
Please no shitposting or blogspam.
No Referral Linking.
Keep piracy discussion off of this community

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

communick@selfhosted.forum

rglullis@communick.news

OpnSense on Proxmox vs bare metal install? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by androidusr@alien.top to c/homelab@selfhosted.forum

12 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm going to set out on installing OpnSense for the first time. I see some people put OpnSense on Proxmox and pass through a pcie network card. Besides the power of backing up and restoring, are there other advantages to this?

My planned OpnSense box is an old Dell Optiplex. It has the normal ethernet port on the motherboard as well as a 4-port PCIe network card that I added. So I'd probably use the PCIe network ports for OpenSense, and reserve the onboard ethernet port for troubleshooting if I royally mess up.

I'm still a proxmox newbie, but I think I can manage the PCIe passthrough. I'm just not sure what other complications that will introduce to my OpnSense and networking learning curve. So I thought I'd ask first and see if some of the disadvantages or advantages would push me one way or the other. I'm afraid of locking myself out of OpnSense because of incorrectly configured networking as I'm learning.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] keyzard@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (6 children)

I run pfSense on a 2 node Proxmox "cluster" (cluster in quotes because I don't have quorum for automatic failover). Each host has a dedicated NIC for the firewall's WAN port attached to my modem which is in bridge mode. When I need to do maintenance on the node hosting the FW I do a live migration to the other node. I drop one ping during the migration.

Honestly, when I was designing it I didn't think it would work......but here we are....lol.

[–] beefandfoot@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Nice. I'll try that myself. Any tips you could share? I assume you have to use the same bridge name for the two interfaces on the two promox nodes for the seemless migration.

[–] keyzard@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Yep, everything is identical across the nodes and I'm using ZFS pools for VM storage.

I also have a dedicated NIC for cluster and replication traffic. So 3 NICs per host; WAN, LAN, and Replication

[–] beefandfoot@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I am lost. What do you use the third nic for? Do you use it to replicate pfsense or proxmox configurations? If you migrate pfsense vm when necessary, you don't need to replicate its configurations. I must be missing something.

[–] keyzard@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Each of my important VMs disks replicates every 15 mins to the second host as a "warm" recovery image. Also, during migration the VM hard drive and config are sent over the replication NICs I believe.

I suppose I don't "need" the third NIC for replication, but old habits die hard.

[–] beefandfoot@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Thanks for the tips. I just migrated the pfsense. Great idea!

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (2 replies)