I’m working on setting up my first homelab. I have an older dell optiplex with a duel PCIe NIC in it. I was wondering if I could setup OPNsense as a docker container or virtual machine so that I could also use the extra resources of the box for other things besides just being a router. Is this a good idea?
Yes, you can. You need a hypervisor that is capable of IOMMU. I know for a fact that you can do it with libvirtd and KVM/qemu. I think you can do it with Proxmox. That much said, I’ve no experience doing this myself.