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.
I don’t recommend it on the basis of being absolutely obnoxious to configure and maintain. If anything goes wrong with the internet in my household, someone will wake me up at 4am to bitch about it too. I tried proxmox and xcp-ng and with both I would run into cases where I couldn’t get into the management interface for any vm or the VM host. Connected directly, monitor would be blank and keyboard did nothing. Force reset, couldn’t find any reason and eventually it would happen again. Now I have a separate device with a probably overkill CPU and 5x the hard drive space needed due to smaller drives being more expensive at the time, but no network or vm access problems.