I’m thinking about moving my router to be a VM on a server in my homelab. Anyone have any experience to share about this? Any downsides I haven’t thought of?
Backstory: My current pfSense router box can’t keep up with my new fibre speeds because PPPOE is single threaded on FreeBSD, so as a test, I installed OpenWRT in a VM on a server I have and using VLANs, got it to act as a router for my network. I was able to validate it can keep up with the fibre speeds, so all good there. While shopping for a new routerboard, I was thinking about minimizing power and heat, and it made me realize that maybe I should just keep the router virtualized permanently. The physical server is already on a big UPS, so I could keep it running in a power outage.
I only have 1 gbps fibre and a single GbE port on the server, but I could buff the LAN ports if needed.
Any downsides to keeping your router as a VM over having dedicated hardware for it?
Yea either failover or an active/active virtual switch… I’ve been toying with hyperconverged infrastructure and I wanted to bring my network infra into the fold, been looking at OVS. Not for any particular use case, just to learn how it works and I really like the concept of horizontally scaling out my entire infra just by plugging in another box of commodity hardware. Also been toying with a concept of automatically bootstrapping the whole thing.
OVS is fine, you can make live changes and something like spanning port traffic is a bit less hassle than using tc, but beyond that, it’s not really an important component to a failover scenario over any other vswitch, since it has no idea what a TCP stream is.