How similar does pfsense hardware have to be to move a config over?
I currently have a (well, 2 actually… one is a cold backup) Dell R420 as my pfsense firewall/router/gateway. I’ve been considering moving to a supermicro newer single cpu server like this 1U 20" Short Depth Server Firewall PFSense X11SSH-F Xeon 3.5Ghz 32GB RAM NVME | eBay to hopefully save on the power bill, and keeping a R420 Dell as a cold “backup”.
What hardware has to be the same? is it just the NICs? I currently have an intel quad Dell/Intel 1gig ethernet nic Dell 0NWK2 Network Adapter Intel I350-T4 Quad Port PCI-E | eBay and an Intel X520-DA2 10gig SFP+ NIC in the current Dell pfsense box. if I have the same nics in both boxes, is that enough similarity between the supermicro box and the dell R420 that moving the config over would work, should the supermicro go down?
You can migrate pfsnese to another system that is completely different as long as it at least has as many nic interfaces as the old system that were in use. When doing the restore you can assign the interfaces. If the incoming system does not have enough interfaces it will still work except the unassigned ones.
I can say I tried the same thing with two similar boxes, it didn’t quite work as well as I thought it would. I had issues with FreeRADIUS, CAs and certs. You can restore parts of the config rather than the whole thing which might get you partway there.
If I were to do it over again, I would build both boxes at the same time, I think it’s a tradeoff between building and troubleshooting.