Question about PFSense Load Balancer

[3zzz]

Greetings all,

I have read the "HowTo" here and I am interested in trying this for a new production network:
http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-use...ur-web-servers

I noticed the author writes "if this is your edge firewall I would recommend a physical machine"

Is this so that PFsense will have dedicated CPU resources to handle the load balancing? Are there other considerations?

I had been considering putting everything onto VMWare ESXi hosts including a PFSense cluster, based on the 2 tutorials here http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Tutorials

1) Installing pfSense in VMware
&
2) "Building a fully redundant Cluster with 2 pfSense-systems between WAN/LAN with CARP & pfsync / pfSense CARP & pfsync failover-simulation"

But maybe I'll need to run separate hardware for the PFSense cluster?
Will be trying some experiments over the next week or 2 to see if I can figure this out... appreciate any advice, TVMIA