with the demise of ESXi, I am looking for alternatives. Currently I have PfSense virtualized on four physical NICs, a bunch of virtual ones, and it works great. Does Proxmox do this with anything like the ease of ESXi? Any other ideas?

  • DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.comEnglish
    22·
    6 months ago

    Tossing in my vote for Proxmox. I’m running OPNsense as a VM without any issues. I did originally try pfSense, but didn’t like it for some reason (I genuinely can’t recall what it was).

    Either way, Proxmox virtual networking has been relatively easy to learn.

    • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
      92·
      6 months ago

      pfSense, but didn’t like it for some reason

      Probably the shitbirds at Netgate put you off it, understandably.

    • kalpol@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      6 months ago

      Admittedly I have not dug too deeply into Proxmox but its learning curve appears kinda steep.

      • anamethatisnt@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        6 months ago

        There’s multiple guides on virtualizing pfsense in proxmox, but the easiest is to simply pci passthrough the nics you wanna use.
        I do recommend you leave a physical nic for proxmox itself to maintain LAN access to it if your pfsense is down.

        • twei@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          There could be driver issues doing this. I had a bad experience with Emulex NICs under OPNsense, Intel OTOH worked flawlessly. Switched back to virtual interfaces tho, as it works about as good as a physical NIC

      • BlueÆther@no.lastname.nzEnglish
        5·
        6 months ago

        its not too bad. i switched from esxi to proxmox about 2 years ago.

        i run a virtualized opnsense with 2 nic’s passed through and another 2 virt, so it can be done

        • bean@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          Hey! I have been using ESXi about three year now. I have two identical NIC I bought. One for WAN and one for LAN. I also discovered I had to use the onboard LAN port (3rd port!) just to be able to access the web control. (Is that normal?)

          Anyway, I want to move to Proxmox, and then virtualize my OPNSense like I have on ESXi.

          I get so confused by how the adapters should be. Ideally I would love to have the LAN connect to a (dumb) switch, and provide Wi-Fi. But one thing I never tried before is a VLAN to protect the LAN from the Wi-Fi traffic, but still allowing some systems to still work like streaming data from the wired PC on the LAN to the NVIDIA Shield Pro. But then keeping the Alexa/Echo system on a more restricted WiFi.

          Can I do all this? I’m thinking I can, but. The hurdle of learning vlans and configuring the new Proxmox (which I’m pretty damn new to) is a daunting challenge.

          I’m ready to try this though. I have a 4G wireless plus WiFi system to keep the other half happy while I tinker to get it all working.

          Thoughts/Tips? Anyone?

          • BlueÆther@no.lastname.nzEnglish
            1·
            6 months ago

            All doable, you might need a managed or smart switch though

            I have 4 bland at home plus untagged all through proxmox and a smart switch

            • one for wan
            • one for web facing servers
            • one for iot
            • one for guest wifi
            • rest of lab is untagged
          • tofubl@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            1·
            6 months ago

            Incus looks cool. Have you virtualised a firewall on it? Is it as flexible as proxmox in terms of hardware passthrough options?

            I find zero mentions online of opnsense on incus. 🤔

            • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              6 months ago

              Yes it does run, but BSD-based VMs running on Linux have their details as usual. This might be what you’re looking for: https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/run-freebsd-13-1-opnsense-22-7-pfsense-2-7-0-and-newer-under-lxd-vm/15799

              Since you want to run a firewall/router you can ignore LXD’s networking configuration and use your opnsense to assign addresses and whatnot to your other containers. You can created whatever bridges / vlan-based interface on your base system and them assign them to profiles/containers/VMs. For eg. create a cbr0 network bridge using systemd-network and then run lxc profile device add default eth0 nic nictype=bridged parent=cbr0 name=eth0 this will use cbr0 as the default bridge for all machines and LXD won’t provide any addressing or touch the network, it will just create an eth0 interface on those machines attached to the bridge. Then your opnsense can be on the same bridge and do DHCP, routing etc. Obviously you can passthrough entire PCI devices to VMs and containers if required as well.

              When you’re searching around for help, instead of “Incus” you can search for “LXD” as it tend to give you better results. Not sure if you’re aware but LXD was the original project run by Canonical, recently it was forked into Incus (and maintained by the same people who created LXD at Canonical) to keep the project open under the Linux Containers initiative.

      • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        Proxmox is quite simple. As a former VCP, I find Proxmox more intuitive to use.

        If you need specific help with Proxmox and/or ZFS, you might also look at posting on https://www.practicalzfs.com

        And +1 for using OPNsense

      • kylian0087@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        From my understanding is that Proxmox is one of the more easy platforms to learn. I must say iI never used it personally.

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    2·
    6 months ago

    Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    ESXi VMWare virtual machine hypervisor
    VPN Virtual Private Network
    ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity

    3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 15 acronyms.

    [Thread #508 for this sub, first seen 13th Feb 2024, 06:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

  • CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    6 months ago

    I ran it on Hyper-V for many years. Still running OPNsense that way. It manages 4 VLANS, RDNSBL, a metric ass ton of firewall rules, and several VPN clients and gateways, with just 2GB of ram and 4 virtual procs. It works and doesn’t even breathe hard.

  • stewie410@programming.devEnglish
    22·
    6 months ago

    We’ve been running KVM on CentOS/Rocky hosts for our VM platforms; seems to work fine for our needs.

    I’m not sure how ESXi would differ as I’ve never used it, but may be an option if you want to roll your own vs proxmox.