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

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days 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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[–] melfie@lemmings.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I considered something like this at one point, but I ended up installing OpenWRT on my existing router instead because what I ultimately wanted was more flexibility, and was concerned about a single point of failure. Now, I have the ability to do things like always run certain devices through a VPN, block specific devices from the internet with a firewall, as well as DNS for self-hosted stuff.

[–] GameGod@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah, this might be the way to go. OpenWRT supports hardware NAT with many of these ARM-based routers like many of the MediaTek-based ones, which gives them super high throughput at very low CPU usage. The efficiency blows x86 out of the water. The ability to migrate your OpenWRT config to new hardware (real or virtual) in the future means you kinda get the best of both worlds....