Advise requried for NIX VM Setup Please

[rama1712]

We are starting a new project to build a new filter system.

 

We want to run 3 smoothwalls as vm machines to filter staff and kids and also have a backup vm machine

 

We have a spare Server that is good spec what we want to know is

 

1) Best Host System

2) Best vm software to manage and create the images.

 

All the above has no budget avail to it so what can we do Advice Please.

We have not great knowledge of of doing this any guides or advice must helpful

But very keen to learn and expand our expericence

 

Stuart

ICT TECH

[glennda]

Smoothwall Express or Paid for smoothwalls?

 

ESXI free would be the best for you I would guess.

[danbuntu]

proxmox is very cool if you want to have multiple hosts with failover and vmmotion type abilities. If you just want one host machine then esxi

[twin--turbo]

ESXi

 

Trialing pfSense for FW/Filter/mailfilter etc.. Having good success so far

 

Rob

[CyberNerd]

ESXi would be a good choice with an upgrade path for when you have some money.

For a fully free (and unsupported) virtual setup then KVM and Ovirt are they way to go. The commercial (and supported) versions are available (quite cheaply) as Redhat Enterprise Virtualisation.

[pcstru]

ESXi would be good *IF* your hardware, particularly network interfaces are properly supported.

[twin--turbo]

I came across ( for the first time ) a d-link card that was not supported but found a thread on installing a new driver. Worked like a charm.

 

Rob

[dhicks]

We want to run 3 smoothwalls as vm machines to filter staff and kids and also have a backup vm machine

 

You'll probably find you want to run one Smoothwall VM, properly configured to distinguish between staff and pupils, and use your VM system to take snapshots of that VM as backups.

 

Check and see if the hardware (i.e. the processor) you'll be using supports passing hardware devices through to virtual machines, that way you can assign a couple of physical network interfaces just to Smoothwall. If you use virtual (bridged) network interfaces, make sure you explicitly set a MAC address on each one, otherwise Smoothwall will see them as new connections on each reboot.