I’m thinking about trying to consolidate hardware when I get my own place where I could run VMs on one PC to have a router(pfsense) and a file server. Would it be better to run a hardware RAID or from the onboard controller? I’m really only planning on running 2 drives as my media library isn’t crazy large and just want a central place for movies and music. I currently have a old x4 955 with 8gb of ram and a intel 4 port nic card. Would something like this be adequate or would I need beefier hardware specs?
It would be fine as long as you could get it to work. Pfsense can be tricky to get running as a vm and the general consensus is you should run it on dedicated hardware anyway.
As for raid I'd use btrfs rather than raid.
The trend I've seen is moving away from dedicated RAID hardware and more towards software raid. unRAID for example doesn't even stripe across drives but will split directories. It has a single large parity disk in the basic setup. XPEnology and FreeNAS are both similar in using their own software RAID formats but do stripe across volumes.
I'm currently playing with XPEnology (NAS) on a Core 2 Duo Intel server desktop board in an old case with 8GB of DDR2 RAM. Just for the NAS storage at the mo. That's more than adequate to saturate my home gigabit network but maybe if you wanted to stream/decode video on the fly it might need more modern hardware.
I've also got a Core 2 Quad Intel server board + 8GB DDR2 RAM in another case running Sophos UTM 9.3 (and another Windows 10 desktop) in an unRAID VM. Sophos is a lot more user friendly IMHO than pfSense (I did play with it for a while) and it detects what hypervisor you are installing it into at boot.
Very easy to setup though it does default to blocking everything apart from basic browsing to start with. I also ran it in a Hyper-V VM on my i5 gaming PC for a while and it had minimal impact on the system I also used a dedicated 4 port Intel NIC and assigned a couple of ports to the Sophos VM, (WAN & LAN) separate fromthe host NIC.
Yup with @Dexter_Kane here I would really suggest running a router on separate hardware. I could run 300/300 on an Intel 1037u where PFsense acted as a transparent router so basically a what those consumer crap does as well but then on a software level. with 2 ports 1 WAN and 1 LAN it can easily handle gbit speeds and that is low grade hardware. That's in the line of the cheapest stuff you can get besides arduino's and RPi's
The other VM's can't crash your entire internet. Seriously get a low power machine and use that for PFsense unless you plan to run Snort or Squid or want insane OpenVPN speed you would do fine.
+1 for getting a "cheap" rig for router and then use you other machine for KVM virtual machines. Especially on pfTricky :P
Thanks for the replies guys. Figured everyone was going to tell me to run it on a separate machine, Was hoping I could save some space and cut down on energy by just running 2 vms on one machine to handle a router and nas, but will probably go with 2 separate ones for the sake of ease of setup and potential performance gains.
Yeah, the thing is that both pfsense and a nas will work better on bare metal. Which isn't to say that it can't be done but it's a lot harder. If you want to virtualise your firewall you're probably better off using something Linux based rather than pfsense as it's a little easier to get working.
All things aside you can run it on braswell machines and those pull <10 watt. So in short you're better off switching a light bulb to LED than virtualize all that in one machine. and well space... dunno what is a lot but a NUC is pretty small.
Not saying it can't be done but I prefer my router separate because it's a lot easier and you can mess with either PFsense or the NAS more without pissing off the rest of the house so much when you screw something up :)
A good solution would be running freeNAS (with zfs) in a VM with SATA passthrough, using their software RAID. If this is not possible maybe you can passthrough a raid card (?), I've heard some bad things about running for example freeNAS in a VM without passthrough so beware.
I personally run freeNAS in a VM works great, I tried running a pfsense vm with passthrough on the PCI-X NIC but this had some major problems and simply did not work - so sure give it a try, but I'm not sure how it will run.