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?
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.
pfSense, but didn’t like it for some reason
Probably the shitbirds at Netgate put you off it, understandably.
No problem using multiple physical and virtual ports for a pfsense in proxmox
Admittedly I have not dug too deeply into Proxmox but its learning curve appears kinda steep.
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.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
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
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?
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
Notes about the switch. What is tagging? The purpose and where?
vlan tags, they make vlans work
It’s not too different from ESXi, things are just named differently in the webUI.
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
From my understanding is that Proxmox is one of the more easy platforms to learn. I must say iI never used it personally.
Proxmox is great
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 HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol LTS Long Term Support software version LXC Linux Containers SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access SSO Single Sign-On VPN Virtual Private Network ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity nginx Popular HTTP server
10 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 28 acronyms.
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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.
Proxmox, TrueNAS, Debian with cockpit etc. really any type 1 hyperviser work’s.
Nothing can beat bhyve for PFSence.
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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.
As Another Proxmox user - I’ve been doing well with it. I use these scripts for the LXC’s which has been fantastic:
https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/
I also can log into it from the web as it’s secured by Authentik, SSO OIDC login when Away from home and need to manage it. Rare! But the option is there! :)
I see a lot of love for proxmox in this thread.
Word of warning from my experience, sometimes PfSense seems to get confused with virtual interfaces. It works flawlessly once it’s up and running, but every time I reboot I have to assign interfaces. It will hang until I do so and will not completely come back online until I manually intervene.
