Dear Friends at VMware,
I have Ubuntu and Workstation Pro 16.
Intended to use the MINI PC with a Xeon CPU4/8 & 32GB Ram and RAID1 2 x 500Gb NVME SSDs
I was hoping to use the machine as a main Firewall and router by installing Untangle on VMware but based on what is said below I am confused since I believed that Workstation 16 provided direct access to the Host Hardware thereby make it highly performant to install in this case Untangle or OPNsense...
The problem with Untangle is that it isn't support ACCESS POINT MODE when using a Wireless Adapter
Which is inconvenient since with Ubuntu I could have taken advantage of the WIFI6E to access the Router and then dedicated the two Ethernet Ports to the Firewall as WAN & LAN respectively.
I could sincerely appreciate the thought otherwise I am told to install the Firewall clean without any other OS...
What is your advice please?
Untangle wants you to have a successful deployment. Unfortunately, our support staff doesn't have the expertise in VMware ESX to ensure that we can help you with installing and configuring VMware. We will certainly help you with your Untangle configuration, provided it's running on ESX.
That being said, we'd like to make you aware that systems like Untangle that require a lot of real time processing aren't great candidates for virtualization. VMware works by "time-slicing" the physical CPUs in the host system. While the VMware server is off processing other virtual machines, the Untangle server is unable to process traffic. At the same time, network traffic continues to arrive. This traffic stacks up and presents itself to the Untangle VM as "bursty." This exacerbates any high load issues that may be present. The exact threshold of where it will be unsuitable is hard to say. It is a combination of traffic level, types of traffic, and user expectations.
In summary: We do not recommend virtualizing Untangle. If you choose to install Untangle in a virtual environment, the support team will assist you with any issues related to the Untangle and its applications, but they will not help with virtualization set up/connectivity issues or issues caused by virtualization (high load, slow speeds, etc).
To ease deployment, Untangle provides a Virtual Application for VMware (OVA) with pre-compiled VM tools from the download page.
The OVA has no swap file the virtual machine be allocated sufficient memory for Untangle.
Wish you well,
Kind regards,
Trevor
