Things Never Stay The Same
After spending significant amounts of time on the Custom Router Build it soon became apparent that there was stacks of headroom left in the M720Q Tiny for other things. So how could I run pfSense, the primary reason for the device, along with other processes or applications that would be useful or just plain fun?
Enter Proxmox
Proxmox is a Virtual Environment and open-source platform for virtualisation. With Proxmox we can make VMs and containers for pretty much anything we need. Fundamentally it is a Class 1 Hyper-visor that runs on bare metal. My initial plans were to run pfSense as a VM then DNS sinkhole Pi-Hole as a container. While I am at it why not spin up an instance of Mint Linux and a container purely to run tshark and learn how to automate packet captures?
Piece of Cake
Installing Proxmox itself is as easy as creating a USB version of the ISO and booting from that. Once installed creating VMs and containers is even easier.
Uploading ISOs is straightforward.
On top of all that the GUI and overall set up of Proxmox is extremely intuitive.
Datacenter will show you the overall server or cluster. Then you have individual nodes – here we have just the one. Inside each node are the VMs and containers.
We can see the Network set up for our ‘Prox’ node. Notice the two virtual bridges that are assigned physical network adapters.
Mint installed as a VM
Pi-hole as a container
Logs
Making a diagram always helps. This set up is the core of my home SOHO network.
So, by using Proxmox on the M720Q Tiny I have pfSense, Pi-Hole and VM for Mint and a container for packet capture. So far the load on the device is not high at all. May want to get some more RAM soon.