Has anyone ever put OpenWRT on to a Lenovo ThinkSmart HUB 500, either directly on bare metal, or as a VM on Proxmox?
On paper both seem like viable options, but I'd be interested to know if anyone had actually accomplished this and whether they have any advice on what to do\avoid?
I was considering consolidating several low power servers that onto a single compact box. Things like Openwrt and my home automation server ad media player, it's nice and neat, and I could free up space by using the built in screen.
I wouldn't be bothering with the wireless as I have a bunch of AP for that, and I need to free up space and power sockets.
I've ran on VM before, but virtual NICs were not as good in the past.
Regarding do's and don't-s, I'd avoid a device that consumes a lot of power (of course YMMV given you can run other workloads as you noted, depending on network configuration of course).
I do the same, albeit not for the router. I tend to prefer dedicated network hardware, as not to have an outage when maintaining the host, etc.
Will it run, most likely.
Will it be fast enough for 1 GBit/s, yes.
But, it only has a single ethernet card and probably no way to extend it internally. USB3 ethernet cards can fill this this gap, but they wouldn't be top of my personal wishlist.
With OpenWrt in mind, the screen is mostly useless - you get cli access, which you may need once in a blue moon, 99.8% of the time it's wasted and I hope you can switch it off independently of the computer (I doubt it).
If you install any modern general purpose linux distribution (and ideally extend the RAM to >=16 GB, maybe 12 GB if you really want to keep it cheap), this can still be a very decent client, internet/ office/ media machine.
Running a highly security sensitive OS, which is used for infrastructure tasks (routing, AGH/ pi-hole or home-assistant, or…) in a VM on top of a windows host sounds like a plan, after all it's not as if the host would reboot regularly on its own, after upgrades. How much I'd trust the security support for windows 10 at this point (yes, I know, Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021, 2032-01-13, on paper), especially if it's also supposed to do multimedia tasks concurrently, is another topic.
Technically you can do that, for an internal lab network that doesn't need to be up 24/7 and is not mission critical, that might even be reasonable (if you are on top of the networking/ VLAN configuration of your hypervisor, have decent managed switches, yada, yada), for the primary WAN facing border gateway… Not my circus, not my monkeys.
Not sure if that was a bit of <sarcaism.>. I bought a mini PC on sale on Ama$on - it ran Win 11 Pro. I thought it was a good idea until the OS kept rebooting for updates with no way to disable (only postpone). I switched the host OS to Linux.
As mentioned - single NICs for a host running a router is somewhat not good.
Running OpenWrt on bare-iron x86_64 hardware is not overkill, if you have above average expectations.
Just that your particular choice is
a) a waste (monitor),
b) needlessly wasting electricity (integrated monitor, which may-or-may-not even enter standby),
c) doesn't have enough internal network cards (1, instead of 2) and
d) windows as hypervisor…
as long as you free yourself from the compulsion that you need to use every spare cycle or byte on the SSD and RAM, it's a router - your border gateway and first defense line towards the internet, not a gameboy.
The answer would be different for a SFF (easy to add a half-height PCIe network card) or tiny system (if it can take a second M.2 A+E-key ethernet card instead of a WLAN card) - and as long as you are aware of its idle power consumption at the wall.
Be sure to consider energy costs (and the environmental impact) as part of your calculus. If energy is cheap (and clean) where you live, this may not matter much. If electricity is expensive, the difference could become progressively more relevant as time goes on when you compare this against a SFF x86 machine or a purpose built AIO "plastic" wifi router.