Why on VM? / Virtual installation vs. Hard disk

[Ragger]

Dear forum,

I am as new to OPNsense, as I am to Firewalls in general. (Relatively new to computers as well...).

So recherching the "modus operandi" of installation I saw many tutorials on how to install OPNsense on a virtualbox. I have allready understood how to do this, but I dont understand:

Why would I install OPNsense on VM, rather than right on the device itselfe?

[tiermutter]

Some people simply like using one host machine doing multiple jobs to lower costs of hardware and operation... And some people like me are using VM for testing. However, it is also possible running OPNsense in VM on remote machines eg in data centers without deploying extra hardware.

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Note that most people doing that to keep hardware cost and energy consumption lower rarely use VirtualBox for the task. VirtualBox is a desktop hypervisor and not really suitable for production operation of VMs. Frequently ESXi or Proxmox are used.

A development environment OTOH is a completely different matter and running in VirtualBox while editing locally in your preferred IDE is probably the most convenient way to do this.

You might want to try my development environment. Even if you do not intend to code you can give OPNsense a spin on your desktop without installing on dedicated hardware.

https://github.com/punktDe/vagrant-opnsense

Kind regards,
Patrick

[bartjsmit]

My reasons are portability and roll-back.

FreeBSD is picky about network cards but when it is in a VM, I can give it a standard NIC, down to the Intel E1000 as a lowest common denominator if need be. The same goes for storage controllers. In general, the hypervisor supports the guest OS, so I am sure of compatibility.

Before every update, I take a snapshot of the VM and if anything breaks, I go back to the snapshot.

I can also vary the CPU cores and RAM amount more easily.

Bart...