Removed by mod

Gotta disagree, for home use at least. I have found it to be the opposite of a nightmare.

Moving my home routing and firewall to a VM saved me hours, and hours, and hours of time in the long run. I have a pretty complex home network and firewall setup with multiple public IPs, multiple outbound gateways, and multiple inbound and outbound VPN setups for various purposes. I’m also one of those loons that does outbound firewall with deny by default on my network, except the isolated guest VLAN. With a complex setup like that, being in a VM means it’s so easy to tweak stuff safely and roll back if you mess something up or it just doesn’t work the way you expected. Turns what would be a long outage rebuilding from scratch into a 30 second outage while you roll back the VM. And being able to snapshot your setup for backup is incredibly useful when your software doesn’t behave properly (looking at you, PFsense).

All that said, I run redundant, synced hypervisors which takes care of a lot of the risk. A person who is not well versed in hypervisor management might not be a good fit for this setup, but if you have any kind of experience with VM management (or want to), I think it’s the way to go.

I’ve been doing it for probably 8 years now without any major issues related to being a VM. In fact, that made recovery extremely easy the two times my PFsense VM shot itself in the head. Just load the backup of the VM taken the day before and off to the races. After switching to OPNsense a couple years ago I haven’t had a single issue.

These days I run two identically spec’d hypervisors that constantly sync all my VMs to each other over 10GB NICs, so even a hardware failure won’t take out my routing. That is something to consider if you don’t have redundant hypervisors. Not really any different than if your physical router died, just something to plan for.

In the last 25 years working with approximately 700 servers that used RAID 5 I saw two of them lose an entire volume. Once was due to a malfunctioning HP RAID controller, and the other was due to a second disk dying while the rebuild from the first failure was still ongoing. There turned out to be a systemic problem with that drive model’s firmware which almost certainly contributed.

So in my experience it’s rare but it definitely does happen.

It can get worse. About 20 years ago the company I was at had an EMC tech yank the wrong power supply from a Symmetrix rack, where the other supply had earlier in the day caught fire! We lost that entire rack’s data (customer’s personal email accounts) due to data corruption. It was probably around 300 10k SCSI disks in that rack, a multimillion dollar expense at the time, and we had to restore all of it from tape over many, many days. Really, really sucked.