What hypervisor would you use to install Sophos Home?

Hi Jasp,

I use vmware esxi only because my last place of employment went to implement it so I had to teach myself and have not found a need to try any other.

It installs very easily on all the hardware i have tried and I use the SFOS ISO to create XGs on the VM. The OVH seems to have issues, but like you said the sample is possibly quite small.

Ian

Users have good success with Proxmox VE. The biggest downside of ESXi is hardware is unsupported after a certain amount of time and the free version lacks some features. Proxmox is free and if your computer can run Linux there's a good chance Proxmox will run on it. 

One of the Sophos engineers (Christian Lempa) has a video on Youtube describing the installation of Sophos XG onto Proxmox. You can search for it there. It is recommended over KVM.

"Clearly setting up a hypervisor adds a significant amount of complexity to a Sophos Home setup. I don't actually need this myself"

Hardware compatibility  //

EDIT: If you really don't want to mess around with VMs and want to run "bare metal" you can use older hardware that has legacy boot support for the XG home. Pick up a used socket 1150/1151 motherboard and a Core i5 "T-series" or Xeon CPU which are low wattage ~35 watt TDP, and a Pro/1000 NIC card. Many of the older Intel NIC i210/i211 series are supported, also the Intel 82575/82576 cards should work.

Possibly ESXI or other is also a good choice.

I run Sophos Firewall and Sophos SG on Citrix XenServer.

Proxmox looks interesting and I like the idea of an open source product rather than a free commercial offering. Unfortunately, it fails one of my criteria, in that it doesn't support unattended install, which surprised me a bit. You can do a scripted install of Debian and then install Proxmox but this is an unsupported configuration. That doesn't rule it out, just reduces its appeal.

alan weir said:

If you really don't want to mess around with VMs

I'm not sure if this is aimed at me or the community in general. I'm aware that you can run Home on old hardware. In the other posting I linked to in my OP, I explained how I became a Sophos partner from personally originally running Home on old Sophos SG hardware.

If you read the forum regularly you will see people often asking about hardware support and you will also see people who have bought XGS hardware (assuming it would be supported) and finding Home won't run on it. The lack of UEFI support is also a frequent issue. The answers to my linked post seem to make it clear that none of this will change in the near future.

I don't need any of this because I have NFR hardware and licensing from Sophos. However, the idea of creating a platform that allows home users to use Home on any hardware platform appeals and I think will be useful to other people. Hence this post and the criteria I have set for it.

I am still working with Hyper-V for Windows for testing purpose. 

Maybe Prism  has some insights here as well. 

Purchasing server is a bit expensive for most home users just to run hyper-v and I think I saw a post that MS is removing hyper-v from future servers?

Ian

JasP said:

Unfortunately, it fails one of my criteria, in that it doesn't support unattended install, which surprised me a bit.

*scratches head*

Unattended installation of Proxmox - Proxmox VE

I've read this article. It is not an unattended install of Proxmox, you can not do an unattended installation of the Proxmox ISO (or at least that is what everyone says on their forum). The article describes an unattended installation of Debian, then installing Proxmox and changing to the Proxmox kernel.

It may sound like I am splitting hairs but, from what I have read on the Proxmox forums, this is not a supported way of installing Proxmox. That is why I said...

JasP said:

You can do a scripted install of Debian and then install Proxmox but this is an unsupported configuration.

I'm not saying it won't work fine, it probably will, but does count as a negative when weighing up the options.

Hyper-V is included in Windows 10/11, for the Pro edition. 

So, are you looking to mass deploy this with a Hyper-V type of installation across multiple locations or something?  Having an unattended installation seems to indicate this which I find the criteria for something so specific fascinating.

If that's the case of such a requirement, I believe that ESXi may be your only option based on your criteria.

I quite honestly got away from ESXi, battling hardware requirements where a battle didn't need to take place to begin with was just... demoralizing.

Xen maybe, I don't know much about their product, the last time I ever wanted to touch their software was after the next to impossible task of setting up Citrix environments when half of what you had to deploy didn't work.  I actually wrote some technical articles for some (now) Oracle software to get it working, lol.

Speaking of, Oracle also has a VM Host software that is available too, but I haven't tried it.