Pfsense / Virtualization / Home network

Submitted by masterg0g0 on Sun, 11/06/2016 - 08:41 Pro Licensee

Hello, See attached diagram.

Basically i am trying to save a bit on infrastructure cost at home, have a dedicated low power pc taking care of my routing with Pfsense installed. I want to install potentially cloudmin on this or virtualbox(Ubuntu) and then use Pfsense on it, running as a virtual router.

So asking people, if this makes sense to install cloudmin and then use KVM or just go for virtualbox. may be cloudmin is a overkill? link to diagram, http://imgur.com/a/5diTa

Thanks, Rohit

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Image icon Home Network(1).png
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Comments

Submitted by andreychek on Sun, 11/06/2016 - 09:35

Howdy -- both of those choices would be viable options.

Both options could be free -- Cloudmin GPL would work just fine for that kind of use. While you could use Cloudmin Pro, it's not necessary.

If you did go with Cloudmin I'd suggest the KVM VM type as you mentioned.

Submitted by masterg0g0 on Sun, 11/06/2016 - 10:00 Pro Licensee

Thanks, thats what i thought. Ubuntu + Virtualbox + webmin as against ubuntu +cloudmin,
Cloudmin option might be more efficient. The networking part is going to most tricky part, I will keep this thread open if u dont mind. to ask for future help. The PC i am going to be using has dual ethernet and i am first assess which OS to go for, Centos 7 or Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. the backup fallback OS would be 14.04, as i am bit comfortable with it.

Submitted by andreychek on Sun, 11/06/2016 - 11:09

We're happy to give you some general pointers with Cloudmin setup and usage.

Just as a heads up -- depending on what sort of assistance you'd like, you might end up needing to purchase a Cloudmin Pro license in order for us to help. However, we can let you know if it seems like that'd be necessary :-)

Submitted by masterg0g0 on Sun, 11/06/2016 - 11:37 Pro Licensee

Hello, I already own a license :) for cloudmin and would still go with GPL for future considerations.

Submitted by andreychek on Sun, 11/06/2016 - 12:46

Aha, so you do! Sorry I had only noticed your Virtualmin license there at first glance :-)

Yup feel free to ask whatever questions you like then!

Submitted by JackB on Mon, 11/07/2016 - 15:41

PFSense as a virtual router is not ideal.. You can actually break out of the virtualisation host and do stuff :).

Submitted by andreychek on Mon, 11/07/2016 - 16:50

I'll add that I've never personally attempted using a router on a virtualized device (Cloudmin or otherwise), so I can't comment on how well such a setup would work. Only that it should be possible to install pfSense onto a Cloudmin-based KVM instance :-)

Submitted by masterg0g0 on Tue, 11/08/2016 - 11:04 Pro Licensee

Hi JackB,

I understand that, there might be some security loopholes, do you have an example or reference? As i am thinking it for the home network.. to save on the Hardware infrastructure point of view.

Some of the Virtualization setups on the internet reported by people, where they are using Pfsense as one of the nodes in their network for routing.. saves them bandwidth, etc..

I might still try this out, for the sake of learning..

Submitted by masterg0g0 on Sun, 11/13/2016 - 10:38 Pro Licensee

hello, Any idea how i should go about configuring the networking on the host and for the guest pfsense os? The pfsense guest would be also routing for the host, is that possible?

Submitted by andreychek on Sun, 11/13/2016 - 10:50

I'm unfortunately not sure how to create such a setup, sorry! I hadn't tried anything like that before, and I'm not sure if it's possible to make that work or not.

Submitted by masterg0g0 on Sun, 11/13/2016 - 13:20 Pro Licensee

Actually that might not be possible, atleast under one OS, Unraid from Lim etechnology might be able to achieve this.. Anyway, Internet --> Host(cloudmin) --> br0(Wan) --> Guest OS(Pfsense router) --> br1(Lan), all other guests, or internet devices... what do you this should work?

Submitted by andreychek on Sun, 11/13/2016 - 14:07

You're quite welcome to try putting a router on one of your Cloudmin guests... however, that's unfortunately not something we have experience with.

We could help you with the OS install if you have trouble getting things installed, but actually performing that sort of complicated network setup isn't something we're familiar with... sorry!

Submitted by masterg0g0 on Sun, 11/13/2016 - 14:09 Pro Licensee

No worries, I will do it with the help of the internet, might update it here for future reference...

Submitted by andreychek on Sun, 11/13/2016 - 14:22

That'd be great! Yeah we'd love to know if that's able to work.

Submitted by JackB on Tue, 11/15/2016 - 01:54

For examples I will see what I can dig out; its still easy enough to do - basically create a vNET route all traffic through that vnet on the host then bridge to that VNet. So you end up with. There is a good article on pfsense's site about using vmware should be easy to adapt and I think it has some articles on why its a bad idea.

Connection <-> PFsense Vnet <-> Cloudmin Bridge