OPNSense - Physcial or Virtual Nics?

IrishBiker

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Feb 12, 2022
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Hi All

I'm in the process of building a new home lab, I'm moving from ESXi to Proxmox and as part of the migration I'm moving from Pfsense to OPNSense. I have just got hold of a HX500 PC which has two physical nic's. I’m having issues with passing through the nic’s to OPNSense but then I thought, I know its best practice is to only pass nics directly to OPNSense but my lan side I will be sharing it with my VM’s which got me thinking. Is there much difference / point? To hardware passing the WAN side?
Thanks

Paul
 
There will be a little overhead but it is not game-changing. I have 54 pfSense VMs, and 30 of them are on PVE, the rest are on Hyper-V and VMware. None of them have physical interfaces that are passed through, it's fine.

I imagine OPNSense is similar to pfSense, and while you will want to use virtio NICs, you will probably also want to disable hardware offloads, but wait for an OPNSense user to confirm that.