Running VMWare Workstation on Vista 64. Machine has DP Harpertowns for 8 cores and 16 GB of RAM.
I was in the process of planning a hardware linux machine with smoothwall or clarkconnect as a dedicated network gateway, firewall, etc. but then I realized I might be able to do the same thing with a VM in my WMWare Workstation. Can it be done reliably and what are the implications? Will the NIC still have access to windows in some (undesirable) fashion since there does have to be a connection to the virtual machine one way or another? If it doesn't give me all of the saftey of the hardware approach it doesn't make a lot of sense.
Are there any networking slowdowns associated with this approach due to the VM overhead? Since the firewall VM would be running 24/7 I could possibly move it to a superspeed ramdisk pro drive permanently set aside in main memory? Would that make any difference?
I do a lot of work at home so I will often be accessing the internet for work related things but my kids also use it for their gaming and the like so I can't slow down or make overly complex their daily activities without bringing down the wrath. Can this be made to work for a day-to-day home and work network?
Are there any detailed examples of people going through with this to look at?
Thanks!
