I am quite new to pfsense and only installed it on a host Win10 Laptop(HP Omen 17 with 32GB RAM) with Virtualbox VM and ESXi VM. Laptop has 2 NICs: 1st on mainboard and 2nd one using thunderbolt 3 port. After reading some articles and posts on forums I came to know that it is not ideal to use pfsense in a VM if the host is also a main machine as in my case. I set up pfsense VM but was not able to get the VLANs function properly as host NICs are in bridge mode. (Mostly used this step by step guide before the 2.5 release).
I recently upgraded my Laptop RAM and ended up extra 2x8GB DDR4 SODIMM RAM sticks. There are also couple of SSD/HDDs available. I also bought a budget 5 port VLAN capable managed switch from TPLink. So now I am looking into some barebone MiniPCs so I can utilize the hardware I have on hand. I am student and on a tight...