I used to use a VM running on my NAS with PCI passthru of an intel gigabit card for wan, and sr-iov passthru for lan. It worked pretty well but the host OS wasnt made to be the best hypervisor so I had reliability issues i couldnt iron out. It was fast as fuck tho, the NAS was my old i9 10850K gaming PC
I ended up buying a chinese fanless celeron mini pc. It has 6 2.5gbps intel i226 NICs. It cant handle IDS/IPS, but its doing fine with my dual gigabit wans and several lans and prefix delegations.
At one point in time i used a very cheap dual realltek nic mini pc, and even that worked fine. Hardware has never really been the bottleneck, its always knowledge limited which is great because theres nothing better than free "upgrades" from leveling up your skills
I used to use a VM running on my NAS with PCI passthru of an intel gigabit card for wan, and sr-iov passthru for lan. It worked pretty well but the host OS wasnt made to be the best hypervisor so I had reliability issues i couldnt iron out. It was fast as fuck tho, the NAS was my old i9 10850K gaming PC
I ended up buying a chinese fanless celeron mini pc. It has 6 2.5gbps intel i226 NICs. It cant handle IDS/IPS, but its doing fine with my dual gigabit wans and several lans and prefix delegations.
At one point in time i used a very cheap dual realltek nic mini pc, and even that worked fine. Hardware has never really been the bottleneck, its always knowledge limited which is great because theres nothing better than free "upgrades" from leveling up your skills