@ Danb35
I tend to look at virtualization more so to bring flexibility to hardware.
In this case, bringing IPMI functionality is more than enough argument to put pfSense on a virtualization host.
I've ran a separate little box described in
#56 on ESXi when it could just as feasibly been running on bare metal.
In retrospect that setup add the capacity to have a "less elaborate" version, already loaded, ready to start be the case the primary pfSense gets borked from experimental settings.
Something I've come to value a lot. Troubleshooting can very shortly be resumed rather than the typical nightmare experience where one starts reverting numerous settings causing a blind mess before getting <back online>. Having a <working pfsense VM> already registered in the host grants me piece of mind.
I'd suggest that your experience with 'horrible routing performance' occured with virtual NICs rather than a passthroughed physical NIC?
Once I reconfigured to a passthrough NIC, a boatload of "why the hell doesn't shit work as planned?" ...just let go. On top of that a hefty <percieved> performance boost all across the board (I think it was related to latency through network stacks?).
PSSST!
viirtuuaaaliiizzhee!