I’m working on setting up my first homelab. I have an older dell optiplex with a duel PCIe NIC in it. I was wondering if I could setup OPNsense as a docker container or virtual machine so that I could also use the extra resources of the box for other things besides just being a router. Is this a good idea?
Hey, as others have said, you can definitely set up OPNSense in a VM and it works great. I wanted to take a second and answer the first part of your question: it cannot run in Docker. Containers in Docker share their kernel with the Linux host machine. Since OPNSense isn’t a Linux distribution (it’s based on FreeBSD), it can’t make use of the shared Linux kernel.
I have PF sense virtualized with no issues.
A bit more about mine now that I have a little more time, it’s a VM on vmWare, it has two virtual interfaces, on on my DMZ vlan, and the other is a trunk with the rest of my vlans. With the *sense, I have 2 phisical I terfaces, and then virtual interfaces that correspond to the VLANs. My router is plugged into my switch on an access port for the DMZ, and the ESXi hosts are connected to the switch with VLAN trunks. This allows me to migrate the router to another host for reboots.
I’m doing it as VM running in truenas, it works perfect. The LAN nic is shared between host and OpnSense and the wan is passed through to the VM as hardware.
It’s much better than my USG4 pro, so that is next to the server turned off