Okay I saw this posted a lot and apparently it is pretty common but why do people virtualize your nas in for example a proxmox server/cluster. If that goes down it gets super hard to get your data back than if you do it bare Metal, doesn’t it? Are people only doing it so save on seperate devices or are my concerns unreasonable?
I do this :). A virtualized router is amazing since you can move it between cluster nodes with zero downtime, and you can restore from backup very quickly if the router’s node fails.
There are zero issues if you know what you are doing and have proper mitigation practices in place - basically that means you have your management interfaces on a flat network and can access opnsense/proxmox/bmc on the same laptop with a static IP. I have a specific switch port connected to that VLAN that I plug my laptop into. If you mess up your config then you just connect directly to the Proxmox webui and access the opnsense vm to fix it.
Another vote for virtualized router! I keep set a core VMs on that host where uptime is the highest priority. I’ve upgraded RAM, downgraded CPU, and eventually switched to an entirely new host with 0 downtime over the past few months. I’d rather not have to wait until everyone else on the network is sleeping before doing any tinkering on the hardware. It’s pretty neat to be streaming some video and then live migrate the router to another physical host with 0 interruption.