Virtualizing my servers

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moistbandit

New Member
Oct 21, 2020
11
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Sweden
Today I have 4 servers in my closet.
  • Fujitsu Esprimo E710 with an i5-3330, 4GB RAM and an Intel dualport Gbit nic running pfsense
  • HP EliteDesk 800 G1 with an i5-4570, 8GB RAM 2x1TB in RAID running proxmox hosting 4 VM's right now (Pi-Hole, Unifi Controller, MariaDB server, Nginx Webserver)
  • HP Microserver Gen8 with 16GB RAM and 4x8TB IronWolf drives running FreeNAS (My primare NAS)
  • DIY NAS with an Xeon 1230v2, 4GB RAM and 4x3TB drives running Rockstor
My plan is to sell them all except the Microserver and build a new one with an i5-10400F, B460 motherboard and 64GB RAM that will cost ~€500 in an Fractal Design Define R4 case I got and virtualize pfsense, and migrate my other VM's to it and also run TrueNAS Core as a VM on it.

Does this sound like a sound plan or would you change anything?
 

zack$

Well-Known Member
Aug 16, 2018
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I would get enterprise gear to begin with.

My personal preference is to also not virtualize pfsense and keep it standalone. Maintenance issues, inter alia, on your host may affect your uptime on pfsense.
 
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TommyL

Member
Jul 7, 2019
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My personal preference is to also not virtualize pfsense and keep it standalone. Maintenance issues, inter alia, on your host may affect your uptime on pfsense.
100% agreed. You dont want to lose your connection if you need to do some maintenance or testing. And if you have a family...i guarantee you they will agree too :)
 

PigLover

Moderator
Jan 26, 2011
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I'd also keep the pfsense machine separate. Lots of potential gotchas there. If you virtualize it and your VM host fails you be SOL if you need to download something to fix it.
 

SamDabbers

Member
Apr 12, 2017
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I agree with the "don't virtualize your firewall" unless you run TWO pfSense VMs on TWO different servers and cluster them. Then as long as one box is up you won't have downtime.
 

moistbandit

New Member
Oct 21, 2020
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Sweden
A little update:
Bought 32GB RAM and a 120GB SSD for $120 for the Xeon box, next up is bigger drives for it.
The single 4GB stick I got in it now will get a new home in the Proxmox-box so it will have 12GB.

The rest is on hold for now.
 

MrGuvernment

Member
Nov 16, 2020
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Ya, go the Xeon route vs a Desktop CPU, usually just means you get ECC and more memory support for future if you need it. And used gear these days is so cheap for how many cores you can get vs a new shiny i5.

If your server will always be up and you dont plan to mess around with ESXi alot, you can virtualize PFSense fine and it will run fine, but as others noted, your server has to go down or reboot there goes your Inet, if your fine with that, go nuts and virtualize.