
When I say better performance, I mean in respect to compared to the equivalent physical firewall. When you start costing out enterprise firewalls that can do advanced threat protection and still provide performance to match today’s 1 gig Internet connections (and higher), these are insanely expensive. One thing you have probably noticed is that physical firewalls that have decent throughput, features, and performance are not cheap. Since my home lab runs 24×7, folding the firewall into the home lab would make sense and allow taking advantage of the other capabilities of workloads that are virtual, as we will touch on a bit further. If you don’t have virtual infrastructure that runs all the time, it may not be something you would consider as you would of course be shutting down your edge firewall with your home lab environment, potentially shutting down general Internet usage if you didn’t have another means for connecting to your ISP. In the case of my home lab, it already runs 24×7. Let me detail how these reasons sway things towards a virtual firewall vs physical firewall and see if any of these reasons resonate with the community and what you are doing.

Licensing is readily available through networking and other connections in the community.Integration with software-defined networking such as NSX-T.Another device to turn off for power consumption.Why virtual firewall vs physical firewall?įirst, you may wonder, why consider a virtual firewall vs physical firewall in the home lab? For me, there are a few reasons that I am considering making the switch to virtual firewall services. In this virtual firewall vs physical firewall in the hoe lab post, I would like to hopefully stir up some discussions around what you guys are using as a firewall in the home lab, any thoughts you have, and what direction you might be headed with firewall services in the future. As a topic of interest for my home lab in 2022, I have toyed around with the idea of collapsing edge firewall services from a discrete firewall to a virtual machine running in the home virtualization cluster. So, in thinking about the direction of where my home lab is headed, I find myself using less and less discrete physical devices as opposed to running things as virtual machines.
