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?
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Proxmox, TrueNAS, Debian with cockpit etc. really any type 1 hyperviser work’s.
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! :)
