Maybe a noob question, but why do you need a dedicated firewall appliance? What is it doing for you that just closing all ports and then selectively reopening as needed (my current solution) won't do? What kinds of threats is it protection your network from?
Also mostly a noob, but my understanding is that most of the value comes from having a subscription to the firewall vendors threat database, and using the box’s deep packet inspection to verify gnarly stuff isn’t coming over port 80 or other common protocols. You want it in an appliance so that you can be assured of isolation from the rest of your network. You can run firewall software in a VM, but you would still want that VM’s host physically isolated or with dedicated NICs for the VM.
Well I dont think you need a real firewall but a serious router is nice for the home network.
A big advantage is that you can do vlans, so you can seperate your homelab from the rest of your devices. You could also do things like block outbound traffic from your home network.
