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

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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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[–] resetbypeer@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Ran it for 1.5 years and it stepped away from it. Besides the fact that as soon as your host goes down or you do maintenance on your host, the network becomes kind of useless (ESP if you have multiple segmentated nets). The other thing to keep in mind is to pass through physical nics. Using just the vnics will potentially lead to security risks. That's the reason I went back to physical fws.

[–] GameGod@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 years ago

The other thing to keep in mind is to pass through physical nics. Using just the vnics will potentially lead to security risks. That’s the reason I went back to physical fws.

I could throw an extra NIC in the server and pass it through, but what are the security risks of using the virtualized NICs? I'm just using virtio to share a dedicated bridge adapter with the router VM.