Internet gateway on a Proxmox VM - feasible?

[danb35]

I’ve just come across Proxmox, and have been playing with it for a couple of days. So far, I’m liking what I’m seeing. I’m wondering if it would be possible to use it in the (or a) way I have in mind.

I’ve been running SME Server (www . contribs . org) at home for about the last 15 years. It’s an Internet gateway/router/firewall and web/mail/file server based on CentOS 6.7. On that, I have VirtualBox installed, and that’s running a couple of small VMs. So far, this has worked pretty well. One thing that I’d really like to see, though, since I started using FreeNAS a few years back, is ZFS.

Enter Proxmox. I’m thinking I can install Proxmox on this server using ZFS, set up ZFS storage, and install SME Server in a VM on there. That way, I get the data integrity and snapshots from ZFS. I can also put the other VMs into Proxmox, which will probably result in better performance for them than running under VirtualBox, though performance isn’t really critical for them.

A concern of mine is access to the Proxmox server. The SME Server is directly connected to the Internet and is designed to provide public-facing services. I don’t think, though, that I want to have the Proxmox server exposed that way--I don’t want to be able to ssh to the host, or reach the web GUI, from the Internet (or more to the point, I don’t want anyone else to).

In short, what I think I’d like to do is have the Proxmox host listen on only one of two NICs, the LAN interface, while the guest listens on both the WAN interface and the LAN interface. Is this possible/practical?

Second, the hardware. This server is running on a Supermicro board with an i3-3240 and 8 GB of RAM. Performance is entirely adequate with this hardware. I’d expect to bump up the RAM to 16 GB to allow for ZFS caching. Should I expect this to work reasonably well, or to die horribly? I guess I could drop a Xeon in there if I had to, but I’d rather not if I don’t need to.

Any thoughts on this?

 

[LnxBil]

Hi danb35,

I run a high availability cluster to have a virtualized gateway on it. I have 3 NICs and roughly the setup you described. Works perfect.

Best,
Andreas

 

[danb35]

Thanks, that helps.

Since Proxmox has the turnkey installer, I'd assumed that it had a web GUI or some other sort of "easy" UI for most, if not all, of the system administration, as both SME Server and FreeNAS do. If this were the case, it would suggest that things like, e.g., configuring network interfaces should be done through that UI, rather than by directly editing the relevant config files. As I look more closely, though, it looks like the web GUI is limited to dealing with the virtualization side of things. Tasks like, e.g., network configuration, SMART test scheduling, or ZFS scrubs would be done from the shell just like any other Debian installation. Is this understanding correct?

 

[pirateghost]

Thanks, that helps.

Since Proxmox has the turnkey installer, I'd assumed that it had a web GUI or some other sort of "easy" UI for most, if not all, of the system administration, as both SME Server and FreeNAS do. If this were the case, it would suggest that things like, e.g., configuring network interfaces should be done through that UI, rather than by directly editing the relevant config files. As I look more closely, though, it looks like the web GUI is limited to dealing with the virtualization side of things. Tasks like, e.g., network configuration, SMART test scheduling, or ZFS scrubs would be done from the shell just like any other Debian installation. Is this understanding correct?

Hey DAN! how you doing? Nice to see you over here. If you need some help with network configurations, hit me up, you know where to find me! I have run a virtualized router for years, and currently run a virtualized Sophos UTM in transparent bridge mode.

 

[danb35]

It's a small Internet, isn't it? But thanks for the assurance. There's a lot of stuff to go over, but it's starting to come together and make sense. And now I see that network configuration is available in the web GUI, so I need to poke around there some more as well obviously.

Does the hardware look OK?

 

[pirateghost]

It's a small Internet, isn't it? But thanks for the assurance. There's a lot of stuff to go over, but it's starting to come together and make sense. And now I see that network configuration is available in the web GUI, so I need to poke around there some more as well obviously.

Does the hardware look OK?

Yeah. I would probably bump up the RAM a bit if possible. But if you aren't going to go crazy with VMs you should be OK.

 

[danb35]

Yeah, I know how ZFS loves its RAM. Which I guess brings up another question--how much of what I know about ZFS from FreeNAS should I expect to be relevant to ZFS on Linux?

 

[1nerdyguy]

Yeah, I know how ZFS loves its RAM. Which I guess brings up another question--how much of what I know about ZFS from FreeNAS should I expect to be relevant to ZFS on Linux?

Quite a bit, actually. ZFS is ZFS still, and works the same way. Just a few features are missing on the ZFSoLinux deployment compared to BSD.