ESXi All in One Boxen Project

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Krazypoloc

Gawd
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Jul 23, 2010
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Hey guys, been running a single low end Windows server for the last 10 years or so at home and doing all my testing/lab virtualization on my beefy workstation with VMware. I've come to the point where I would like to move to a more powerfull router/firewall at home and have settled on pfsense. Now my plan is to build a big beefy server and run ESXi5 on it and virtualize everything. When I say everything I mean everything. Convert my Windows file server to ZFS, run pfsense and get rid of my Asus router, and then run whatever other VM's on there I want. Any input on this would be great as to a "do this, don't do this" type format.
 
I do this, my box isn't that powerful or fancy, but I'm running a pfsense VM, server 2003 VM, Trixbox VM as well as a few Ubuntu Server VMs on it without issue. Two NICs, bit of VLANing, so far so good.

Used to have a 1u Firebox as my router... but that thing was freaking loud and hindering my 50/5 connection quite badly at times. After having enough of the noise, I visualized the router/firewall and haven't had any issues yet.
 
NickTheSloth said:
Used to have a 1u Firebox as my router... but that thing was freaking loud and hindering my 50/5 connection quite badly at times. After having enough of the noise, I visualized the router/firewall and haven't had any issues yet.
Click to expand...

Yeah one of the reasons for doing pfsense in a virtual environment is resource scaling and the ability to increase the amount of resources when I do get that 200MB connection a few years down the road.

Thanks for your input.
 
NickTheSloth said:
I do this, my box isn't that powerful or fancy, but I'm running a pfsense VM, server 2003 VM, Trixbox VM as well as a few Ubuntu Server VMs on it without issue. Two NICs, bit of VLANing, so far so good.

Used to have a 1u Firebox as my router... but that thing was freaking loud and hindering my 50/5 connection quite badly at times. After having enough of the noise, I visualized the router/firewall and haven't had any issues yet.
Click to expand...

Which firebox were you using? was it modded? Were you using snort? Any other packages?
 
Krazypoloc said:
Hey guys, been running a single low end Windows server for the last 10 years or so at home and doing all my testing/lab virtualization on my beefy workstation with VMware. I've come to the point where I would like to move to a more powerfull router/firewall at home and have settled on pfsense. Now my plan is to build a big beefy server and run ESXi5 on it and virtualize everything. When I say everything I mean everything. Convert my Windows file server to ZFS, run pfsense and get rid of my Asus router, and then run whatever other VM's on there I want. Any input on this would be great as to a "do this, don't do this" type format.
Click to expand...

Do it. All my home servers including Untangle are virtual. Size it appropriately. I have multiple vSphere boxes for lab and failover. No real reason not to do it.
 
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