Selfhosted
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Yeah, this is perfectly doable. I ran a very similar setup for a while. I'd recommend passing one of the NICs directly through to the VM and using one for the host to keep it simple, but you can also virtualize the networking if you need something more complex. If you do pass through a single NIC, you'll need a switch capable of handling VLANs and a bit of knowledge on how to set up what's called a "router on a stick" with everything trunked over one connection and only separated by VLANs.
Keep in mind, while this is a great way to save resources, it also means these systems are sharing resources. If you need to reboot, you're taking everything down. If you have other users, that might be annoying for everyone involved.
I have a managed switch. I’m a little confused how everything would be hooked up if I’m using a vm for pfsense and another vm for some Linux distro. I want the router and that distro to be isolated from my other vlans. Could I use the onboard nic hooked up to the switch to put the distro on its own vlan?
You can absolutely attach each VM and even the host to separate NICs which each connect back to the switch and has its own VLAN. You can also attach everything to one NIC and just use a virtual bridge(s) on the host to connect everything. Or any combination therein. You have complete freedom on how you want to do it to suit your needs. How this is done depends on what you're using on the host for a hypervisor though, so I can't give you exact directions.
One thing I should have thought of before; if two NICs are on one single PCI card, you probably can't pass them through to the VM independent of one another. So that would limit you to doing virtual networking if you want to split them.
Passing through a NIC just adds complexity, not lessens it. And is a bad idea for a plethora or reasons
I would strongly disagree. In terms of setting up OPNSense (I use pfSense, but same concept), it's easier to just do a PCI passthrough. The alternative is to create a virtual network adapter on your hypervisor, bridge it to a physical NIC, and bind the virtual adapter to the VM. The only advantage to be gained from that is being able to switch between physical NICs without reconfiguring the OPNSense installation. For someone with a homelab, when would you ever need to do that?
My Proxmox server uses a 10Gb PCIe adapter for its primary network interface. The onboard NICs are all passed through to pfSense; I've never had any need to change that, and it's been that way for years.
I don't mean this to sound overly critical, and I'm happy to be proven wrong. I just don't see a "plethora of reasons" why doing PCI passthrough on a NIC is a bad idea.
I'm happy to discuss it, as I've written articles about it.
I live high level routing and firewalling in VMs (60 Gbps+), and there are a couple of realities you need to accept, especially when you involved a *BSD in the mix.
I mean, you do you. But I'd much rather to just be able to change the uplink on a vSwitch or bridge to get my router going again instead of having to reboot, passthrough, insert grub cli options, swap cards, etc.
Having tried both, I found it far easier and less troublesome to just add a PCI passthrough than it is to worry about managing the network both on the host and in the VM. As long as FreeBSD supports the driver, I strongly recommend passthrough vs virtualized NICs.