hypervisor for nas and router

[dkoudijs]

Overview of the project for home

- Have a hypervisor setup running 2 vms

VM 1 - pfsense to be main router

VM 2 - NAS for backup of PC's/Server (Media/Pictures/Files)

 

Suggestions as to hypervisor and nas software to run?

 

Long story if your still reading

I have a qnap t22 that I was given, which is end of support this year. I have a main server that I backup to the qnap, and to an external usb that I take to work with me as my offsite.

I also currently have an old PC running pfsense.

 

Since the qnap should be replaced as its EOL, and getting windows to connect already is a pain (dropped support for smb v1) was looking to replace it.

I do have access to a i5 gen 4 CPU pc from work I could use for this project. And I think about 8 or 16 GB of ram sitting around.

I have 3 PC's with about 4 TB of backups in total. With about 10 GB in diffs nightly.

 

So suggestions on nas software, and the hyper visor?

Was thinking of vmware forthe hypervisor (esxi) and freenas for the storage?

I do have some IT experiance and can google if I hit an issue.

 

Thanks for any advice.

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

I do this on my home network. I use proxmox s the hypervisor, opnsense s the router, nd do nas shares on the host directly, with a lot of other vms aswell.

 

Id keep it seprate if you can. Makes it harder to fix, and more issues, with not much benfit. Id just get a cheap box for the router. 

[dkoudijs]

4 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

I do this on my home network. I use proxmox s the hypervisor, opnsense s the router, nd do nas shares on the host directly, with a lot of other vms aswell.

 

Id keep it seprate if you can. Makes it harder to fix, and more issues, with not much benfit. Id just get a cheap box for the router. 

Never heard of proxmax, will have to read up on it.

Didn't think hypervisor's normally allow nas shares directly, since the goal is to present local hardware to the local guests. Will have to read up on that.

Yes I could get a cheap box for the router, was trying to downsize the number of PC's running in the house. (Have 4 + router + nas now)

[Electronics Wizardy]

6 minutes ago, dkoudijs said:

Never heard of proxmax, will have to read up on it.

Didn't think hypervisor's normally allow nas shares directly, since the goal is to present local hardware to the local guests. Will have to read up on that.

Yes I could get a cheap box for the router, was trying to downsize the number of PC's running in the house. (Have 4 + router + nas now)

 hypervisor is bsiclly. full os under the hood, so you cn run services it on it like ny other os cn.

 

Id really get a seperate router so if you wnt to mess with your nas the rest of the system doesnt go down with it.

[Ubuntu is love]

ESXi is not a bad choice (if there is support for the machine). But Proxmox what @Electronics Wizardy mentioned is also a good alternative. And I think that a I5 4gen with 8/16 GB of memory could work for everything you mentioned. So then it would be a type one virtualisation with 2 virtual machines on them. A router in a virtual machine is not a best practice, but certainly possible and for a home setup it does not matter that it is not really best practice.

[dkoudijs]

Thanks for the info.

I do see lots of routers professionally installed in a vm. Yes they are normally seperated to be running the webfacing apps.

F5 comes to mind.