It's a decent-ish option if you need advanced routing functionality; one thing to keep in mind, though, is that unless you're OK with running unstable 'nightly' code, you'll be spending USD 8K+ on an annual basis.
Sounds fair to me. Truth is there's no good alternative other than pfSense but if you want Linux (hw support etc) I don't know if you can do better than vyos for routers.
However, if you're comfortable with CLI and modifying configs in /etc/ then just running a bare metal Alpine Linux box is perfectly doable on a tiny box. iptables/nftables for firewall/NAT, dnsmasq/bind9 for dns, dnsmasq/isc-dhcp for DHCP. I've got a handful of these boxes all interlinked via wireguard, sharing routes via BGP using bird.
Sure, you miss the config verification that VyOS provides, but does mean you learn the underlying tools themselves and that knowledge is portable to any other box running those systems.
Personally, I don't quite understand why VyOS is a standalone distro when it could just be a config generator/checker package. Could even support multiple different underlying tools so if you want to use dnsmasq over bind9, or vice versa, it can provide a unified config interface for them.
If wanting internal and external subnets as "zones", iptables/nftables lets you match against incoming and outgoing interfaces. It would be trivial to make match against an incoming interface and jump to a zone specific chain. This is how I manage private subnets. fw-mark is also useful for setting routing rules. Can change which routing table is used by matching rules in iptables.
If wanting to do more stateful things, I'm not aware of any default package, but setting a rule to send packets to an NFQUEUE and implementing some custom logic on that nfqueue would be rather trivial too. I'm sure eBPFs are useable in there somewhere too, but I've very little experience with them.
Obviously iptables/nftables has its own issues, as seen in recent (and not so recent) posts about it being bypassable with raw sockets, but that tends to be host only and not when used as a gateway.
https://support.vyos.io/en/support/solutions/articles/103000...
You create a _zone_. You name it and assign some interfaces to it. For my needs, I only assign 1 interface per zone. Then, you specify with which other zone that zone can receive traffic from. That also comes with the identification of a firewall rulesets to apply to that pair.
So, `'Zone WAN (iface eth0) <- Zone LAN (iface eth1)' => apply fw LAN-TO-WAN`
When you do that, the firewall rules become much simpler to write and maintain.
But, a best practice is to assign every zone to every other zone. This soon becomes a combinatorial nightmare. When you want to add a zone, you have to create 2xN new zone configurations and 2xN new firewall rulesets.
iptables -N eth0toeth1; iptables -P eth0toeth1 DROP; iptables -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o eth1 -j eth0toeth1; iptables -A eth0toeth1 -m tcp -p 80 -j ACCEPT; # add any more rules
Or, as you say to avoid exponential combinations, just make a chain for each zone (interface) and explicitly allow specific protocols/ports to target interfaces. Zones with multiple interfaces are just multiple rules to jump to the same zone chain.
I can't even find anything related to policy-based routing (PBR).
We need something modern - easy clustering, modern API, event stream, gRPC-based plugins, etc. (And yes, I have thought about developing it myself, it's on my pile of TODO)
I tried if few times and every time I stuck on something and messagefrom developers was: this isc-dhcp feature is not supported. This was huge national scale ISP and bypassing those limitations means a lot of $ to adapt surrounding systems providing input to isc-dhcp LDAP DB in its own config style.
or `vbash` in VyOS for all of those :/
But this is my point; why is VyOS a distro when vbash could just be a package available to other distros?
OpenWRT comes to mind, I've been using it for decades on first dedicated hardware, the last 6 years running in a container on a ProxMox box (DL380 G7). It has no problems whatsoever routing at (gigabit) line speed using a few megabytes of RAM and a few cores. Configuration is mostly declarative using UCI although it also offers the freedom (which comes with responsibility) to use scripts. I use the latter to deal with edge cases which lie outside of the purview of normal routing operations, e.g. triggered actions related to the use of Timelimit [1] on my daughter's phone, IoShit things with special needs, etc.
This is must have to be considered by any ISP/enterprise where networking is their core business.
vOS has all three. More or less buggy but they are here.
The above mentioned I feel are good enough for home and SOHO(small businesses).
[1] https://openwrt.org/packages/pkgdata/kmod-mpls
[2] https://openwrt.org/packages/pkgdata/frr
If anyone knows other Opensource routing software that support all of this - let me know. To my knowledge vOS is the only one.
They have an LTS release, no?
They seem to follow the RedHat strategy though, only subscribers can download prebuilt images, but you can build the LTS ones yourself: