I’m working on setting up my first homelab. I have an older dell optiplex with a duel PCIe NIC in it. I was wondering if I could setup OPNsense as a docker container or virtual machine so that I could also use the extra resources of the box for other things besides just being a router. Is this a good idea?
You can do it as a VM.
The only downside is you lose internet while rebooting your server, may not be a big deal though.
I have opnsense virtualized on a proxmox server with a couple of things that should hardly ever need restarts. It actually works pretty well because the host almost never needs a reboot and rebooting a vm is way faster than bare metal