Migration from Physical Firewalls

[spetrillo]

Hello all,

I am moving away from physical to virtual firewalls. This question is about which filesystem I should use for my virtual firewall. Do I use ZFS and add vRAM for ZFS or do I use UFS?

Thanks,
Steve

[Patrick M. Hausen]

When I have ZFS as the storage medium for virtual disks in the hypervisor already, I use UFS in VMs and snapshot them from outside.

In case you don't, I'd recommend ZFS. But keep in mind that the copy-on-write nature of ZFS effectively thwarts thin provisioning. Best provision your virtual disks thick, i.e. with their entire size preallocated. An OPNsense installation does not need a large disk, fortunately.

[spetrillo]

Aha...so if I am using Proxmox with ZFS I could then do UFS for the firewall vms. Never thought about that!