Hello everyone! As my first post I have taken up quite a project to get into virtualization and making my own networking hardware for my home network. I have an old Samsung qx410-jo1US laptop with a dead keyboard, touchpad, multimedia card reader, and one dead usb 2.0 port.
The entire machine is gutted as the chassis itself was severely damaged, but he lcd screen is still functional. What I would like to do is:
get a mini sata -> sata adapter, hookup a laptop drive to that and the onboard sata port replace the sd card reader and use that to store an OS
use some form of virtualization to run pfsense and make the laptop my new wireless router for my home network which consists of a ps3 that I use purely these days to stream media to my tv, a gaming desktop that I'm constantly playing League of legends and various steam online games with/occasionally streaming to twitch, and my brother's laptop that he uses to stream movies online with.
simultaneously run a file server off of the unit that will play host to my music and ripped dvd/blu ray collection and occasionally be used to backup family photos and home movies
I have never really touched virtualization software at all, and I feel this will be a good exercise to get familiar with it, but I need help as to where to even begin, and if my idea is a pipe dream for the hardware I have access to and if I would be better off going with two independent devices networked together?
system specs: http://www.samsung.com/us/computer/pcs/NP-QX410-J01US-specs
Virtual Machine Managers (VMMs) come in two types, bare metal (native) and hosted.
Bare metal VMMs are very small pieces of software which allow for the Virtual Machines (VMs) to get direct access to hardware (Citrix Xen, VMWare ESXi, Oracle VM Server), while hosted VMMs are pieces of software which allow a guest OS to run on top of a host OS (VMWare Player/Fusion/Workstation, Oracle VM VirtualBox); the latter requires the VMM to modify the guest OS kernel (guest additions) to prevent VMs "harming each other" (special instructions access).
As for implementation, you could use ESXi and bridge the WLAN interface to pfSense for client access, bridge the Ethernet interface to provide the default gateway to your next hop device, and have your fileserver connected to an internal network; ESXi allows you to create virtual switches, which could be used for connecting the fileserver up.
If you do decide to use ESXi, note that the VMM itself should be installed on a small partition (perhaps a memory stick), then use the internal HDD as an ESXi datastore.
Would you suggest setting up a virtual environment on my gaming rig to test setting up all the software, or will that cause me headaches due to inception style computing of virtualizing a virtual environment?
You could always test using a hosted VMM, and then move your VMs to a bare metal VMM on your laptop. Alternatively, you could install ESXi on a memory stick on your desktop and have a blank HDD as the datastore; it's up to you. Using a hosted VMM may be safer, though.
You won't want to use the laptop to provide wifi. You may be able to use it as a router, but bear in mind it may not be the fastest depending on your CPU clockspeed. the best way to set up wifi with PFsense is to buy an external access point (or several) and have them connect to the LAN on the pfsense machine. Then the pfsense machine just does wired stuff.