I’ve run mine as a VM for several years now. I haven’t noticed any appreciable impact on performance vs bare metal. I am able to max out my 1000/40 WAN.

That being said, the platform you use to virtualize it on will have an impact. I am running mine on a 3 node proxmox cluster with 10gig networking and SSD backed Ceph storage, so my benchmarks for performance grossly outweigh what my WAN bandwidth can accommodate.

They really aren’t that much more expensive than a high end smart TV. I’ve been seeing them at about $10(US) per inch. So a 60 inch TV is roughly $600(US). But I guess it all depends on availability of them in your local market.

If you are looking for a “dumb” TV, check out models that are for “digital signage” like the Samsung BEC-H series. They are as dumb as you can get while still buying new.

I expose quite a few services to the web, so having that extra layer of protection is nice. And it allows me to control what leaves my network from an application perspective, not just TCP/UDP

ZenArmor. It integrates nicely with Opnsense and offers all of the features that I was looking for.

I run a pretty hefty home lab, so my costs are fairly high compared to some.

• Electricity: $70/mo
• Internet: $55/mo (1000x35)
• Cloud backup: $20/mo
• Web firewall/IDS/IPS: $8.30/mo ($99/yr)
• Domain/email: $15/yr
• VPS: $1/mo

Overall: $155/mo