When running VM environments one does not always have the luxury to control all parts in a way one might dream of. Since it is quite easy to build a highly available routing & edge firewall setup with FreeBSD using technologies like carp, pf and pfsync with relatively cheap and easily available hardware, this requires you to be able to deploy and manage this hardware which might not be possible in some situations.

In this talk I want to discuss in how you can still deploy a similar setup using VMs and what additional challenges you will face. To help judging if planning/running such a setup is actually worth you time in a situation you might face some challenges this talk will go through things like

• interesting idiocies in virtual machine networking & drivers
• how to prepare for the day when something is broken and now you can't access
• the webinterface to get to the console of your virtual router since this
• would need the routing to be up and running
• how is the performance impacted by this?