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?

  • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    6 hours ago

    It works well. I have my docker hosts on HA as well because they’re almost as important as the router.

    If you just use 2 nodes, you will need a q-device to make quorum if you have one of the nodes down. I have the tiebreaker running on my Proxmox Backup Server shitbox I3.

    Proxmox is basically just debian with KVM and a better virt-manager. And it deals with ZFS natively so you can build zpools, which is pretty much necessary if you want snapshotting and replication, which are necessary for HA.

    • GameGod@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      2·
      6 hours ago

      If you just use 2 nodes, you will need a q-device to make quorum if you have one of the nodes down

      I could just use VRRP / keepalived instead, no?

      I should try Proxmox, thanks for the suggestion. I set up ZFS recently on my NAS and I regret not learning it earlier. I can see how the snapshotting would make managing VMs easier!

      • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        6 hours ago

        Proxmox uses a voting system to keep cluster integrity.

        Check it out, it’s free and does a lot of things out of the box that take a lot of manual work otherwise. And the backup server is stellar. It does take a while to wrap your head around the whole way it does things, but it’s really powerful if you spend the time to deep dive it.