Virtualizing OPNsense on Proxmox as Your Primary Router

Are you curious how to set up OPNsense on Proxmox as your primary router? In this video, I show one way you could go about doing it using the Protectli VP6650, but you may adapt this guide to the hardware you wish to use.

This guide assumes you have an existing network and that you are planning to migrate to a virtualized instance of OPNsense. The guide also does not do a full network configuration in OPNsense in an effort to keep the video shorter. Once you have OPNsense up and running, you can use other guides I have created to configure OPNsense for your network.

The focus of this video is getting Proxmox configured properly, creating the OPNsense virtual machine, and showing how to physically connect everything to your network. You must be careful to not conflict with your existing network once you have the OPNsense VM set up (conflicting IP addresses, multiple DHCP services running on the same network, etc).

I recommend disconnecting the Proxmox server from your network or connecting it to a dedicated VLAN with different IPs to avoid issues with your existing network if you wish to do more testing before swapping out hardware.

See also the addendum video    • Addendum: Virtualizing OPNsense on Pr...   where I demonstrate a few things based on some feedback and questions that I have received.

For a written version of this guide, please visit:
https://homenetworkguy.com/how-to/vir...

Hardware used in the demonstration (affiliate links):

Protectli VP6650 mini-PC: https://amzn.to/49NVFXP
Grandstream GWN7806 (non-PoE) switch: https://amzn.to/3PTdWvl (link for the GWN7806P PoE version)
ZimaBoard 832: https://amzn.to/4ax8xCw)
TinyPilot 2a: https://tinypilotkvm.com/?ref=homenet... (for screen captures)

Chapters:
01:32 Physical connections
05:36 Configure Proxmox server
20:54 Create OPNsense VM
35:54 Demostration of assigning VMs/CTs to VLANs

EP42