What is everyone using for dedicated firewall solution these days? I was previously using a Zotac CI323 running ESXi with a pfSense VM on it until lightening from the tropical storm took out both my cable modem and the interface I was using for my WAN port in one shot.
While I liked the ESXi route on the Zotac box, it still presented a challenge when it came to patching the hypervisor due to the FW VM being run on that box. Also, the lack of IPMI is no fun should issues ever arise with the hypervisor.
I have another dedicated ESXi AIO box (E5-2648L v3, 128GB DDR4, etc) that I have built a new VM on to get me going again, because of course, my home LAN is is broken to different VLANs and all the L3 gateways are on the pfsense box.)
Current network hardware:
Unifi AP-AC-Lite
Unifi 16XG 10GbE switch
Juniper EX2200-c
Internet:
150Mbit/10Mbit
Requirements:
1GbE minimum due to L3 gateway for VLANs currently
Low noise/heat/cost <$200 USD
Items I'm considering:
APU2C4 - Dedicated hardware, Intel NICs, for pfsense
Supermicro ITX board to throw in a spare ITX case (this would give me the option of throwing a 10GBe NIC to connect to Unifi switch) to throw pfsense back on
Used FW from ebay (SRX240 maybe?, suggestions)?
Unifi USG (are these things still pretty gimped with features)?
Dell R210ii 1u server
tldr; looking for dedicated firewall suggestions in 2018
While I liked the ESXi route on the Zotac box, it still presented a challenge when it came to patching the hypervisor due to the FW VM being run on that box. Also, the lack of IPMI is no fun should issues ever arise with the hypervisor.
I have another dedicated ESXi AIO box (E5-2648L v3, 128GB DDR4, etc) that I have built a new VM on to get me going again, because of course, my home LAN is is broken to different VLANs and all the L3 gateways are on the pfsense box.)
Current network hardware:
Unifi AP-AC-Lite
Unifi 16XG 10GbE switch
Juniper EX2200-c
Internet:
150Mbit/10Mbit
Requirements:
1GbE minimum due to L3 gateway for VLANs currently
Low noise/heat/cost <$200 USD
Items I'm considering:
APU2C4 - Dedicated hardware, Intel NICs, for pfsense
Supermicro ITX board to throw in a spare ITX case (this would give me the option of throwing a 10GBe NIC to connect to Unifi switch) to throw pfsense back on
Used FW from ebay (SRX240 maybe?, suggestions)?
Unifi USG (are these things still pretty gimped with features)?
Dell R210ii 1u server
tldr; looking for dedicated firewall suggestions in 2018
Last edited: