I have been conducting an extensive evaluation of both pfSense CE 2.7.0 and OPNsense 24.1.7 for a potential edge firewall refresh across several development environments. The traditional methodology of deploying each on separate physical hardware or repeatedly re-imaging a test appliance proved to be both time-consuming and financially inefficient when considering the cumulative compute and storage costs in our cloud staging environment.
To facilitate a truly parallel and comparative analysis, I architected a solution utilizing a single, moderately-sized virtual machine (in this case, an Azure D4s v3 instance) to host both firewall distributions simultaneously. The core enabler for this is the use of distinct VLANs, effectively creating two isolated logical networks on a single virtual network interface. This allows for direct, real-time comparison of features, rule processing, and VPN performance without network cross-contamination.
The high-level configuration for the hypervisor (in my case, a Proxmox VE host) involved creating a Linux bridge with VLAN awareness. The critical step is defining multiple network interfaces for the VM, each tagged with a different VLAN ID, and presenting them as separate virtio devices to the guest OS. Within the guest, both firewall distributions are installed in parallel, but each is configured to bind its WAN and LAN interfaces to the specific virtio device associated with its designated VLAN.
A simplified view of the interface assignment within the test VM:
```
# VLAN 10 dedicated to pfSense instance
- virtio0 (WAN for pfSense): Tagged VLAN 10, bridged to physical uplink
- virtio1 (LAN for pfSense): Tagged VLAN 10, internal test network segment
# VLAN 20 dedicated to OPNsense instance
- virtio2 (WAN for OPNsense): Tagged VLAN 20, bridged to physical uplink
- virtio3 (LAN for OPNsense): Tagged VLAN 20, internal test network segment
```
The operational and cost benefits of this approach are significant:
* **Infrastructure Cost Reduction:** Eliminates the need for two separate VMs running 24/7. A single VM with 4 vCPUs and 16GB RAM suffices for testing both under load, versus two VMs at 2 vCPUs and 8GB each. This represents an approximate 35-40% reduction in compute spend for the testing phase, depending on your cloud provider's pricing tier.
* **Comparative Testing Fidelity:** Both firewalls can be subjected to identical synthetic traffic patterns (using tools like iperf3) from clients on their respective VLANs. This allows for direct performance benchmarking of metrics such as throughput with IDS/IPS enabled, VPN tunnel establishment time, and CPU utilization per gigabit of traffic.
* **Streamlined Configuration Analysis:** Side-by-side analysis of functionally equivalent rules (e.g., a site-to-site IPsec VPN or a complex NAT rule) becomes trivial, as both administrative interfaces can be accessed concurrently without context switching between physical consoles or IP addresses.
The primary consideration is ensuring the hypervisor and physical switch are configured for trunked ports that allow the designated VLANs. This model has provided unparalleled data for our evaluation, moving the decision from a qualitative preference to a quantitative analysis of throughput-per-dollar, feature-specific resource overhead, and administrative latency. The next phase will involve capturing detailed metrics on the cost of running each platform with equivalent plugin/package sets under a simulated production workload.
Show me the bill.
CostCutter