Last time...
If you are joining me from my last post, you know that we now have a small form factor HP ProDesk 600 G1, running an Intel Core i7-4770 with 24GB RAM and a 1TB SSD. The CPU and RAM are a little outdated, but it's otherwise quite capable of holding its own with everyday tasks. However, everyday tasks are not what I built this machine for.
This machine was built primarily for use as a firewall. This much computing power is wasted on simple network routing, however.
The software in use:
Proxmox: ProxMox is our virtualization hypervisor. This is the software that will enable us to run multiple operating systems at the same time and treat them all as separate machines. If you're familiar with something like VMWare's vCenter, you'll feel pretty at home with this open source alternative. As with most Open Source Software, you can easily find ProxMox for free on their download page.
OPNsense: OPNsense is one of the largest firewall distributions out there, competing for the top spot with pfSense. They both share a common ancestory, so there's not too many differences between the two that ended up making a difference for my implementation. However, there were reports of a bit of a spat between the two that put a sour feeling in my mouth for pfSense. As it doesn't make a large difference for implementation, I'm not going to go into the details on it here. If you're interested in OPNsense, you can get it for free on their download page.
Making our virtual environment.
Placing the ProxMox ISO onto a flash drive didn't end up being too much of a hassle. Booting this ended up working like most other fresh operating system installations.