If you don't have to submit to the wrath of an auditor, it's probably good enough. <br><br>In terms of security risks, your hypervisor/host OS needs to be locked down, as an attacker could present the WAN NIC to another guest and route it that way, or launch a new VM with both NICs. Again, not something to worry about at home.<br>
<br>FWIW, the auditors I've run up against, especially in PCI, don't look at the virtual switching in a virtual environment the way they do on a physical switch. That is, they won't blink if you separate two networks with VLANs, but put two VMs on different VLANs using a trunk to the ESX server and oh boy...<br>
<br>Sean<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 9:00 PM, Kelly Leveille <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:kel@kelweb.ca">kel@kelweb.ca</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Hi All,<br><br>I'm considering setting up a firewall/router in a virtual machine to seperate a couple networks in my home. I intend to dedicate one of the host NICs to the WAN port of the router VM & will not load a TCP stack for that NIC in the host OS (ESXi supports this config). In theory, this configuration is as secure as a hardware router because packets can only be routed via the VM. <br>
<br>My questions are:<br>
<br>
Have any of you had any good/bad experiences with this type of setup & are there potential security risks I'm not considering? <br><br>Also, if you think
this is not as secure as a hardware based solution, please explain why not. <br><br>I'm not doing it to save money. I am aware that I could do the same thing with a consumer router. I'm just interested in the possibility.<br>
<br clear="all">Thanks,<br>-- <br><font color="#888888">Kelly
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<br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Sean Walberg <<a href="mailto:sean@ertw.com">sean@ertw.com</a>> <a href="http://ertw.com/">http://ertw.com/</a><br>