I’m working on setting up my first homelab. I have an older dell optiplex with a duel PCIe NIC in it. I was wondering if I could setup OPNsense as a docker container or virtual machine so that I could also use the extra resources of the box for other things besides just being a router. Is this a good idea?
Only issue I had with a similar setup is turns out the old HP desktop I bought didn’t support VT-d on the chipset, only on the CPU. Had do some crazy hacks to get it to forward a 10gbe NIC plugged into the x16 slot.
Then I discovered the NIC I had was just old enough (ConnectX-3) that getting it to properly forward was finicky, so I had to buy a much more expensive ConnectX-4. My next task is to see if I can give it a virtual NIC, have OPNsense only listen to web requests on that interface, and use the host’s Nginx reverse proxy container for SSL.