CARP with Different Systems, packages and rules
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I had an interesting thought today, I am in the process of setting up an ESX 5.5 system on my home lab. I have been running pfSense on an Alix board for my home firewall, but with the addition of ESX, I would like to run a pfSense Virtual machine, and add some of the higher CPU/Memory required packages, mainly Squid (for starters), to handle both outbound transparent caching, and reverse proxy.
However I would like it to be able to fail back to the Alix system in even that the ESX server is down for an update or something, but of course this system wouldn't have Squid setup, so I would simply pass the reverse proxy traffic to a local http server with a notice indicating site down for maintenance, while still allowing the remaining network devices internet access.
Since the main goal of a redundant CARP setup is for redundancy, I know the idea is typically identical systems, with rules / packages all synced. Has anyone ever tried to do a setup that was different like this before, with or without success?