Hyper-V or VMWare with PFSense at home?

masloki

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Nunya
Anyone hobbying around with virtual machines at home? I grabbed a little zeebox to run pfsense on. But got to thinking that there is excess cpu and storage, I could probably run a little webserver and move my owncloud and other miscellaneous low usage hosting there. Obviously, those two probably shouldn't be mixed on the same machine, but should be fine if they are virtual machined. Is it worth the trouble? I have never used hyper-v or similar, just virtualbox.
 
I've used both. I've done HyperV for a client of mine and in my former job we were a VMWare shop.

I tend towards the latter.

Most of the linux web sites I deal with use XEN or KVM.
 
Well, the hyper-v free edition was a surprising PITA. All command line and powershell, so I figure I will fire up the manager from my win10 box. About 30 minutes of googling permissions that need to be changed so two computers on the same workgroup and the same router will listen enough to each other and I quickly scrapped the idea. I now better understand microsoft's idea of a free server software :)

Standalone PFSense it is.

The Zotac nano box is pretty nifty. Quad core n3150 Intel board and consumes about 10 watts for about $200 after ram+ssd. Probably move a couple of my other random always on PCs background stuff to another one.
 
I actually am working with Oracle's Virtual Box now on my Mac. It looks pretty nice.
 
VMware worked well for making the most out of my jepp subscription :)
 
Company has been using VirtualBox on the desktop machines for years. Free and works. Paired with Vagrant it's pretty powerful. Just don't try to scale it up.

Had XenServer farm for the cheap and relatively easy to maintain route for a long time. Converted it over to HyperV last year on Server 2012R2 and never looked back on the cheap non-production farm internally. Way easier to maintain and the PowerShell stuff isn't that hard.

Production stuff is moving to AWS. Hard to beat for the price. Might even kill the internal non-production farm eventually and move it up to AWS.
 
So, I just couldn't drop it since I knew getting the vm running was possible, and allow me to get some more mileage out of the hardware. Proxmox is a very lightweight Debian build for kvm and you can do the tricky work from SSH, or the easy work via browser. Pretty slick monitoring of the vm's. PFSense is a good firewall, the main thing I wanted was the ability to get OpenVPN running, which was easy. Gave it the wan port, hard coded proxmox ip, and PF handles the rest of the house's DHCP, and runs squid to speed things up.
 
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