Lately my router seems to be struggling under all my devices and after some googling, it seems my Archer AX1800 isnt really meant for more than 20-40 devices and I’m currently sitting at 50 with heavy torrent traffic and a media server with 15-20 friends and family connected (typically not all at once of course).
I was looking at the Omada networking gear but then thought of trying OPNSense since I have pretty much everything I need on hand versus spending $400+ for the Omada stuff.
I’d like to run it on the media server since I have tons of compute/RAM available but my question is about the ethernet ports. My mobo has a dedicated 2.5Gb ethernet port built in and I have a second 2.5Gb card that I could toss in there as well, but my concern is that I may saturate the ports with all the additional traffic. My LAN is just 1Gb outside of these two PCs.
My other option is an unused Optiplex 3050 micro that I’ve installed a second ethernet port on but these would both be 1Gb ports.
Am I likely to run into saturation issues on the media server or should the 2.5Gb ports be more than enough to handle the load? Apart from the torrents and video streaming, the rest of the network is mostly typical devices like phones/tablets/consoles, 6 4K POE cameras connected to an NVR and frigate, and a bunch of IoT devices connected to Home Assistant.
I don’t necessarily mind using the Optiplex but I’d definitely prefer to keep everything in one place if I can. I realize that this means my network goes down if I restart the host but it has been a pretty rock solid setup and Proxmox means I can just restart individual containers/VMs rather than the host most of the time.
Edit: forgot to mention that I’m open to buying another quad port NIC for the server if recommended, but would definitely prefer to not spend money if possible. I was planning on using the current router in AP mode along with its ports for a switch and I have another 4 port 2.5Gb switch in the mix as well
Opnsense VM proxmox is how I’ve been set up for years now. Whatever you choose now will be a piece of cake to migrate later, either as VM backup/restore or opnsense’s, so don’t fret too much.
I’d use the tiny PC if the 1 Gbps cards are good enough. “Up to 1.2Gbps” that’s pretty close. Reason for tiny PC is to keep internet in separate hardware than the rest. For me, limiting when I could do anything hardware related on the homeserver to when internet outages are OK was too much. I use a mini PC n100 for opnsense and pihole (so the core network stuff, routing firewall dhcp dns).
Whichever hardware you’re on, I would have the wan nic on it’s own bridge in proxmox, cable straight to ISP. Opnsense VM gets a vnic on that bridge for wan. Then lan one is just like your other VMs on the lan/inside bridge. Same setup whichever box you end up on. And backup/restore the VM if you want to migrate or test and compare speeds on both. or explore HA and have both involved.
To parent’s point about skipping the hypervisor: that works great too. Opnsense install on a new drive and restoring cfg backup is super quick, which would be one of the big benefits of using a VM. You can do a lot of add-on stuff in opnsense like adblocking, so possibly eliminate need for running those as side VMs on a “network box” like mine.
If you’ve got the time and desire, test them all out. Once you get migrated to opnsense itll be easy to swap around