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.

  • keyzard@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    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.topBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      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.topBEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        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.topBEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          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.topBEnglish
            1·
            11 months ago

            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.