I undertook a similar project last year to replace my outdated Soekris router: http://output.chrissnell.com/post/39550480075/the-jack-of-all-trades-home-server

I undertook a similar project last year to replace my outdated Soekris router: http://output.chrissnell.com/post/39550480075/the-jack-of-all-trades-home-server http://output.chrissnell.com/post/39550480075/the-jack-of-al... I built a mid-tier server-grade machine with Intel NICs and I run ESXi on it. My firewall (pfSense/FreeBSD) runs virtualized in an instance. It's very flexible, stable, and the performance is outstanding. I used VMware's vSwitches to connect the pfSense VM with dedicated NIC ports for each network segment.