💻 Protectli Vault 6 Port Firewall Mini PC with Intel Quad Core i5 (8250U) Processor and AES-NI Technology – Barebone Review

Bought for use in the Proxmox+pfSense setup as a replacement for my old router. It's powerful enough to host multiple small virtual instances, so a whole range of features can be packed into this small chassis. Small, quiet, cool (gets warm when high CPU usage is expected) in a nice package. Good buy.

First, I bought the Protectli FW6D directly from Protectli and not from Revain because Protectli is close to my home and because Protectli is a US company. Market like Protectli FW6D. I chose this device because it has good specs including an Intel Core I5 processor, 6 network ports, a serial port, an HDMI port and four USB ports. Memory and storage can be upgraded with standard hardware. The hardware itself is housed in a rugged metal case with cooling fins on the top to dissipate heat away…

The product is a good compact machine. I bought a small standalone ESXi host for a small remote site. (i5 4 cores/8 multithreading). It doesn't have a fan, so don't press 100%. Even at 70%, the case feels very warm, but dissipates the heat well. In addition to the ESXi host, we run two virtual machines, an OPNSense firewall and an application server. If necessary, he could easily double the charge. We have vmnic0 and 1 as our WANs. We have the rest as our virtual machine network. Our first…