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Running a OPNsense firewall in a VM? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

30 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I am not overly happy with my current firewall setup and looking into alternatives.

I previously was somewhat OK with OPNsense running on a small APU4, but I would like to upgrade from that and OPNsense feels like it is holding me back with it's convoluted web-ui and (for me at least) FreeBSD strangeness.

I tried setting up IPfire, but I can't get it to work reliably on hardware that runs OPNsense fine.

I thought about doing something custom but I don't really trust myself sufficiently to get the firewall stuff right on first try. Also for things like DHCP and port forwarding a nice easy web GUI is convenient.

So one idea came up to run a normal Linux distro on the firewall hardware and set up OPNsense in a VM on it. That way I guess I could keep a barebones OPNsense around for convenience, but be more flexible on how to use the hardware otherwise.

Am I assuming correctly that if I bind the VM to hardware network interfaces for WAN and LAN respectively it should behave and be similarly secure to a bare metal firewall?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I'd been running OPNsense in a VM for some time. I used xen as a hypervisor, but that shouldn't really be a requirement. Passed the nics through and it was golden! All the benefits of a VM - quick boot-up, snapshots on the hypervisor - it's truly glorious :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (3 children)

Sounds great. What about hardware acceleration features of the NIC? I read somewhere that its better to disable the support for that in OPNsense when running it in a VM?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

Dunno, worked well for me. Give it a shot and see if anything needs to be disabled.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

in my case the driver had a bug with power management, so i had to disable that on the hypervisor.

other than that everything worked well, passing the nics through also passes all the features.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Another option is to pass through the PCIe devices to the VM.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I just saw that option. What would be the advantages and disadvantages of this?

I guess when I pass the actual NIC device the hardware acceleration should work?

Edit: Looks like my host system does not support this, at least that is the error I get when trying ;)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

For one you offload the entire processing and driver handling to the VM, so if the OS wants to do something funky, it can.