New build - virtual

Panja · Sep 15, 2015, 9:10 AM

Hi all,

I ran pfSense a while ago and I was hooked on it. Love it!
At the moment my servers moved to a different data center and are running behind a Cisco ASA now.

But for my home network I would love to run pfSense as well.

I have a Zotac ID91 lying around doing nothing atm.

Processor: Ci3-4130T
Ram: 2x 4GB (ddr3)
Drive: Samsung 840 Pro (256GB)

This would make a nice pfSense setup I guess?

But I would like to run 1 (maybe 2) small servers on it as well, doing small local stuff (nothing fancy).
So I was thinking of running vmware on it and run a pfSense VM aside the 1 or 2 servers.

Would this kind of setup be advisable?
Would the virtualization of pfSense make a huge performance drop?

Any advise on this will be greatly appreciated.

Guest · Sep 15, 2015, 2:22 PM

This would make a nice pfSense setup I guess?

For pfsense only for sure not bad.

But I would like to run 1 (maybe 2) small servers on it as well, doing small local stuff (nothing fancy).
So I was thinking of running vmware on it and run a pfSense VM aside the 1 or 2 servers.

I really thing there fore the Zotac is to small and not powerful enough!

Would this kind of setup be advisable?

Go and set up the Zotac with pfSense alone and then we will see whats going on.

Panja · Sep 15, 2015, 2:46 PM

Thanks for the reply Frank.

Will give it a go without vmware first.

Would you advise to install pfSense on SSD or on an USB thumb drive or SD card?

keyser · Sep 15, 2015, 5:37 PM

SD card or USB pen definetly. It leaves more space on the SSD for the datastore and it makes it infinately easier to upgrade ESXi/change hardware and such.

Panja · Sep 15, 2015, 7:24 PM

And if I don't use vmware. Would a SSD the better choice or still use an USB stick?

Guest · Sep 15, 2015, 9:42 PM

Would a SSD the better choice or still use an USB stick

I personally would go by the SSD and do a full install, because the SSD would be really good to run also
Squid & SquidGuard on this. But if you have no need of this it would also going with an USB Stick with
NanoBSD on it to boot from.

Keljian · Sep 16, 2015, 1:12 AM

I do not agree with the previous posters.

I was quite happily running a file server, pfsense @ 100mbit w/suricata, mythtv and a few other services on an i5-4570T (which is a glorified i3, lower clock, with VT-D)

Cpu usage at peak was about 30% for the two vcores I gave pfsense.

I use ESXI, and I have installed to an SSD (cause seriously, the hypervisor is TINY).

I upgraded to a 4790 for the fact I run remote desktop windows instances on it - that is the only reason.

toomeek · Sep 22, 2015, 2:43 PM

We're running pfSense on Linux KVM, Citrix XenServer and VMware ESXi environments quite well up to 100/100Mbit speeds.
More requires more CPU/RAM and some tweaking.
Generalny KVM is better for most cases unless You need VLANs.