Smothwall - Appliance or VM?

[steveg]

If you run smoothwall onsite, do you run it on one of their appliances, or as a VM?

 

We are just looking at options moving forward to add some redundancy, as at the moment we only have a single appliance which is just coming out of warranty. Ideally we'd like to eliminate the single point of failure.

[5tu]

2x appliances here configured as a active/passive failover cluster. When warranty expired on our first appliance (an S8) we bought a new S10D and configured the S8 as the passive failover unit.

[Rob_D]

Similar here, except we've got an S10 as failover and a newer S9 as primary.

 

Maybe it's old school thinking, but I like my firewalls to be a physical box between the local network and the internet.

[PotNoodleTech]

I run most things as VM but firewalls not so sure. Would probably prefer to have physical units as that makes troubleshooting and also accountability much straighter - i.e if the appliance isnt working or has performance issues its always the companies fault they cant blame your VMs or hosts.

[DrCheese]

Run ours on old Dell Servers (Physical) - The appliances always came across as massively overpriced for the spec for me (£4000 for a i7 7700 when we last did a refresh), so I just cycle out our old VM cluster servers to smoothwall every few years.

 

Does run ok physically but support will heavily try to push you to an appliance or running it as a VM (I totally get why) but have supported us when we've needed it (They're a good bunch!)

Edited September 12, 2024 by DrCheese

[Aprice]

Appliance would be my preferred, preferably HA as every Smoothie we've had has a tendency to lock up twice a year or so needing a power out reset to get it back up again.

[tom_newton]

VM is fine if you want to do that.

Some hardy souls run bare metal on their own tin (also fine, but there can be compatibility issues we can't guarantee to be able to fix)

[3s-gtech]

We’re one of those - our old bare metal host started to die (known iDRAC issue) and Smoothwall were very helpful in getting my own host set up using the same config. Worked great since (touch wood).

[pete]

Initially ran it on our own tin when we started out, but moved it to a VM to make it hardware agnostic and make migration easier.