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There seems to be a fair bit of information about running pfsense as a virtual machine on another hypervisor of some sort, but I am wondering if I can do the reverse and use a pfsense install as the host to run some linux vm's.

pfsense seems to be really good at handling multiple wan's etc, but I need to run same linux vm's for other tasks within the firewall.

It seems I might be able to run virtualbox or bhyve.

Any other options? Any pointers?

Peter.

Peter Nunn
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1 Answers1

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I've heard rumblings that bhyve will be in an upcoming release.

But.

This really is not something you should consider doing. PFSense is a purpose-built appliance, tuned for routing and network security tasks. Sure, it may be technically possible to do what you propose, but it's a horrible idea.

Let your router do what it's good at, and use another host/VM for general computing tasks.

EEAA
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    In general I agree whole heatedly, however, in this case, we have one server on site that has to do multiple jobs, one of which is firewalling and handling multiple redundant wan connections. PFSense seems to do what better than the linux alternatives, but if I can't run linux VM's on the same machine I can't use pfsense. – Peter Nunn Apr 06 '16 at 05:36
  • So install ESXi on the host. Then you can install pfsense and as many Linux machines as you desire. Doing so is a much, much better solution than what you propose, which will end up being brittle, difficult to maintain, and insecure. Trust me here: you do not want to do this. – EEAA Apr 06 '16 at 11:57
  • OK, thanks I'll look at that perhaps. I've used kvm for this sort of thing before but thought it would be better to use the native hardware for the firewall instead. I guess I just bridge the nics to get the fail over working? – Peter Nunn Apr 09 '16 at 09:17