Should I build a hardware based pfsense router or should I virtualize it?

[mhweb]

I'm completely new to pfsense, and I'm wondering if it's best to virtualize the router or build a small server.
The router is for home network, planning to upgrade to 1GB internet and 10GBe for PCs and unRAID server.

PS: I would use unRAID to create a VM for pfsense.

[bmeeks]

@mhweb said in Should I build a hardware based pfsense router or should I virtualize it?:

I'm completely new to pfsense, and I'm wondering if it's best to virtualize the router or build a small server.
The router is for home network, planning to upgrade to 1GB internet and 10GBe for PCs and unRAID server.

PS: I would use unRAID to create a VM for pfsense.

If you can't use ESXi as the hypervisor, I would recommend bare-metal (hardware based) for your setup. There can be issues with the levels of support provided by the various virtual environment NIC drivers and the underlying FreeBSD operating system used by pfSense.

[ian2u]

I've run pfsense on ESXi on 1st generation HP Microserver N40L with separate DMZ and IOT segment for over 5 years and it run great. I only recently upgraded to bare metal for the need to use pfblockerNG with a large exclusion list.

Advantage of running it under ESXi is for me to easily manage the networks (virtual switch) with my other virtualized servers, such as AD, DNS, squid proxy, NAS, etc.,

[provels]

Run mine on Hyper-V, no real issues. Some imaginary ones, though.

[MxcZXAKM]

I was having some issues but seems most of them were fixed with ESXi 7. I’d say if you have the horsepower and RAM, use ESXi.