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?

  • GameGod@lemmy.caOPEnglish
    1·
    6 hours ago

    The other thing to keep in mind is to pass through physical nics. Using just the vnics will potentially lead to security risks. That’s the reason I went back to physical fws.

    I could throw an extra NIC in the server and pass it through, but what are the security risks of using the virtualized NICs? I’m just using virtio to share a dedicated bridge adapter with the router VM.