Smoothwall on a VM

[ddrueding]

Of course virtualbox is free and allows enough network configuration to work I think.

An interesting proposition. All that really needs to be able to be done is direct mapping of NICs to the VM without any NAT or other junk. I physically have a "Red" and "Green" NIC that only talk to the VM, a cable goes from the "Green" to the switch and then back to a NIC that is on the host OS.

The icing on the cake would be if the startup of the VM could be automated at startup of the computer.

 

[Chewy509]

dd, virtualbox can do those things you mentioned... (at least on any *nix host).

 

[blakerwry]

vbox does allow additional "vbox networks" that are completely isolated from each other (under File->pref->network). The VMs can then be assigned to any of these pre-defined networks and provided either no external access or NAT'd external access (or fully bridged access outside of these networks if desired).

I use this to host a network of older OS's as guests which communicate with each other and directly with the host OS, without any additional network access allowed to the guests. Vbox's RDP plugin provides remote desktop access to control the older guests or they can be controlled from the host as usual.

The downside is that these networks tend to get wiped out whenever you update to the latest point release of vbox... so write down your settings. the settings are also quite limited in their configuration. For example, virtualbox runs a DHCP server on these virtual networks, but does not allow you to control the DHCP settings such as DNS, gateway, etc.

ESXi, in contrast, has done the best job I've seen of virtual networking in any VM software so far. Extremely configurable. From your guys' comments it sounds like this extends to their other products as well.