I haven't tried it on an embedded platform, e.g. a Geode or Via CPU.
I'm using an old mini-ITX IPC board from Jetway with one of the first dual core Atom cpus, 1GB of ram (overkill) and 4 x Gbit ethernet ports. With a slim case / power supply I think it was ~$250 about 5 years ago when I bought it.
Other than moving apartments it's only ever been rebooted once, to upgrade from pfsense 1.2 to 2.0. It's never crashed and never caused a problem, and I beat on my network connection. OpenVPN performance from outside is only limited by my WAN speed. It's been awesome.
I also use pfsense in a VM in front of a bunch of other VM's on a VMWare server and it works great for that as well.
I've used an old eMachines PC with a couple of network cards and a switch in the past. An order of magnitude better than the Linksys router from my ISP it replaced. Also never had to reboot until I moved.
Never tried it as a VM front before. Good to know it's another option.
I was formerly on solar before moving to an apartment. Hence the "I've used an old eMachines PC... in the past." Besides that, the power supply barely made past 200W, which is basically 2 incandescent bulbs.
As someone who was on solar you should realize that 200W is a _lot_ of power. Especially if it's 24/7. If you hadn't heard people have moved away from incandescent bulbs because the energy use is considered unacceptable.
I'm using an old mini-ITX IPC board from Jetway with one of the first dual core Atom cpus, 1GB of ram (overkill) and 4 x Gbit ethernet ports. With a slim case / power supply I think it was ~$250 about 5 years ago when I bought it.
Other than moving apartments it's only ever been rebooted once, to upgrade from pfsense 1.2 to 2.0. It's never crashed and never caused a problem, and I beat on my network connection. OpenVPN performance from outside is only limited by my WAN speed. It's been awesome.
I also use pfsense in a VM in front of a bunch of other VM's on a VMWare server and it works great for that as well.