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?

  • kalpol@lemmy.worldOP
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    10 months ago

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

    • anamethatisnt@lemmy.world
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      10 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.de
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        10 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.nz
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      10 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.world
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        10 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.nz
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          10 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
    • ikidd@lemmy.world
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      10 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

    • MangoPenguin
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      10 months ago

      It’s not too different from ESXi, things are just named differently in the webUI.

    • kylian0087@lemmy.world
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      10 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.