this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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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?

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[–] bradd@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

I have 2 vcpu (host) for the pfsense vm, xeon e5-2667 3.2ghz, i see both cpu hit about 80% max during speed tests.

pfsense ce 2.7.2-RELEASE

[–] GameGod@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)
[–] bradd@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)
[–] GameGod@lemmy.ca 1 points 3 days ago

Thanks, this is good data!