I have been running Opnsense for quite some time now. Started with pfSense and one of their SG1100 appliances. When I got 1GbE to the house I found out the SG1100 couldn't handle the Gigabit speeds. This was also the time that NetGate was playing many games with their licensing so I decided to make the switch. I have never ever looked back. I read your article and do agree with most of what you said, but for my use case I have not bothered with traffic shaping or web filtering. I agree with the monitoring and reporting that is why I am looking into Zabbix. I think the modularity is an advantage, capabilities are not automatic but then it also does not weigh the system down with a bunch of stuff you may not need. Even though I have run it for a fair amount of time there is always things to learn and that includes me with Opnsense.

This is a great article, never dawned on me. I have (3) Dell Micro's with NVME drives I will have to check those specs out.

@Andrew Kunz thanks for your advice. At 70 I feel your pain and your "addiction". Just getting started with Ansible/Semaphore and Zabbix for monitoring. Lots to learn and do. I have some security cameras around the house along with Home Assistant running in a VM so I am now thinking my first stab at a docker container will be Frigate as an NVR and doing some object detection with a Google USB Coral. When "successful" with this I may then get into the new reverse proxy (Traefik or Caddy).

@JohnLohman thanks for sharing your experience. This first VM will be running on my Dell Optiplex 7050 and will run Frigate. Google Gemini suggested this machine over my two enterprise servers because of the i5-7500T processor and iGPU contained within. After reading up on Frigate it has suggested that I run 2 cores, 8GB of ram. I gave the VM a 32GB hard disk, I will mount a 1TB Sata III 7200RPM drive as a bind mount within the container for recordings. So I will see how it goes.

Great article. I am using Unbound and Dnsmasq on my Opnsense firewall for the DNS & DHCP services. Because I am using TP-Link Omada compatible switches and access points then my next service is the Omada SDN in an LXC container on Proxmox so I can manage my WiFi and my switching (which includes Vlans). Then from there would be Nginx Proxy Manager to handle a wildcard certificate and so I don't have to remember IP addresses/Port numbers.

I have a 3 node Proxmox cluster that I just upgraded all to VE 9. I did a fresh install on all of them. I did this because I replaced one of the nodes, an old Dell R710, with a somewhat newer Dell R630. I installed 9 on the boot drive and then restored all my LXC's and VM's from my Proxmox Backup Server's last backups. This took time but was flawless. On my Dell T320 I learned how to use ZFS send and receive to move my archival files to the R630 off of the T320, then I was able to re-configure my ZFS pools on the T320, do the fresh install of Proxmox 9 to one drive by itself and then move the archival files back to the T320. The 3rd node is a small Dell Optiplex 7050 that had nothing installed or running on it but Proxmox 8 so doing a fresh install of 9 was not an issue. My overall design I am following is: R630 is the "compute" node where the majority of VM's and LXC's will run, T320 is the "storage" node, right now this has Cockpit with it's file-sharing-module running in an LXC. This provides a nice front end for NFS and SMB shares, The Optiplex 7050 will be a 3rd quorum vote and be dedicated to an NVR. I am thinking Frigate with a Google USB Coral I have. Just a side note all of these machines are now exclusively ZFS file systems. I also have now upgraded my Proxmox Backup Server from V3 to V4.