After having a difficult first week with a new Netgear SRX5308 I've decided to cut my losses and go another direction and have just configured a pfSense virtual appliance on my ESXi host. I'm really impressed at the moment and I'm quite happy that pfSense is what I want to be running.
As a VM it adds virtually no overhead to the host aside from needing some extra networking. However it does become dependent on the hardware in the host, which is also running VMs for file serving and in order to swap out or add disks I usually need to power down the host - which is going to bring down the Internet connection for the LAN.
The alternative is to run something like a basic Dell R200 which is fairly inexpensive to buy now (compared to the Netgear router at least) and run pfSense on dedicated hardware. The downside to this really is only additional power draw, but something like an R200 with fairly basic specs wouldn't be that high (but still higher than a normal router I'd have thought).
So yeah... any thoughts/opinions on which is best? Highly subjective of course!
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