X99 DELUXE on board wifi

[bigjme]

Hi everyone,

This may be a question that nobody can help me with but it is worth a try.

I am currently trying to set up an opnsense router for home within a vm on vmware.

The reason for this is that I have a power restriction applied for network switches and servers. My current server is due an upgrade meaning I need to cut back on some power elsewhere. I am therefore looking to remove my router out of the equation and use a vm on my server which runs 24/7 instead.

The server has a host of windows 10, for the wan interface I have enabled bridging, and disabled everything else for the adapter so vm's have usage but windows does not.

This should allow some isolation from the wan (which is pppoe anyway). I have the lan interface on a second nic which is set to bridged but with the server having access.

This should work fine. The problem is that I have  a few wireless devices and need to get opnsense serving that too. Its not heavy traffic, just YouTube etc.

I was planning to upgrade the server to an X99 DELUXE which has on board wireless ac (it's a broadcom chip, model   BCM4360 I believe) I'm  not too fussed on the ac as I have no devices that need that speed nor can, but I want to pass through that on board wireless to use as an access point.

Is this possible in a vm without a separate pci card or a usb wireless dongle? The server will not have any free pci slots so an extra WiFi card is not possible but a usb one is if I have to go that route.

Either way, is this possible? I know it's suggested to just use an access point but in this instance I can not

If anyone has done similar, it would be great to hear about it as this is my first time with a Linux firewall. I did look into ipfire which I know has better wireless support but it is simply not as user friendly as opnsense

Again, sorry if this is a silly question, but I would rather be told, then spend the money and find out the hard way.

Regards,
Jamie

Edit:
After having a look through my system requirements, I am able to free up 1 pci-e 4x slot which would allow me to install a wireless card in the server, and order the cheaper x99 pro without the on board WiFi.

I then have 3 options as below if the on board could not be used.

Option 1
Buy a usb wireless dongle, connect it to the vm and hope that works in opnsense

Option 2
Connect a pci-e wireless card to the server, and set up on the windows host to share the lan port from the vm, which should allow the vm to only see 2 lan adapters, and the host to run the wireless network and bridge

Option 3
Do the same as option 2 but using the on board WiFi as the access point

Can anyone see a down side to having the host run the access point? And would this even work?