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Virtualizing my router - any experience to share? Pros/cons? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by GameGod@lemmy.ca to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

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I'm thinking about moving my router to be a VM on a server in my homelab. Anyone have any experience to share about this? Any downsides I haven't thought of?

Backstory: My current pfSense router box can't keep up with my new fibre speeds because PPPOE is single threaded on FreeBSD, so as a test, I installed OpenWRT in a VM on a server I have and using VLANs, got it to act as a router for my network. I was able to validate it can keep up with the fibre speeds, so all good there. While shopping for a new routerboard, I was thinking about minimizing power and heat, and it made me realize that maybe I should just keep the router virtualized permanently. The physical server is already on a big UPS, so I could keep it running in a power outage.

I only have 1 gbps fibre and a single GbE port on the server, but I could buff the LAN ports if needed.

Any downsides to keeping your router as a VM over having dedicated hardware for it?

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[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

HA... Do you mean failover? It would need some consideration, either a second wan link or accepting that a few TCP sessions might reset after the cutover, even with state sync. But it's definitely doable.

I'm currently in a state of ramping down my hardware from a 1u dual Xeon to a more appropriate solution on less power-hungry gear, so I'm not as interested in setting up failover if it means adding to my power consumption simply for the uptime. After 25 years in IT, its become clear to me that the solutions we put in place at work come with some downsides like power consumption, noise, complexity and cost that aren't offset by any meaningful advantage.

All that said, i did run that setup for a few years and it does perform very well. The one advantage of having a router virtualized was being able to revert to a snapshot if an upgrade failed, which is a good case for virtualizing a router on its own.

[–] notfromhere@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yea either failover or an active/active virtual switch… I’ve been toying with hyperconverged infrastructure and I wanted to bring my network infra into the fold, been looking at OVS. Not for any particular use case, just to learn how it works and I really like the concept of horizontally scaling out my entire infra just by plugging in another box of commodity hardware. Also been toying with a concept of automatically bootstrapping the whole thing.

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

OVS is fine, you can make live changes and something like spanning port traffic is a bit less hassle than using tc, but beyond that, it's not really an important component to a failover scenario over any other vswitch, since it has no idea what a TCP stream is.