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I use OPNsense as my firewall of choice. It's a fork of pfSense, since the owners of Netgate/pfSense are a bit crazy at times, and have slowly been closing the source. It runs on normal x64 hardware and has quite wide software support for everything you will probably want. The lowest power way to run it is with a Atom or Celeron embedded based box, such as those produced by Qotom, or the US reseller Protectli (who will even install OPNsense for you if you want). All of these have multiple gigabit ports, you have the option of merging some of them using link aggregation, but eventually the Celeron will be the limit. OPNsense (and pfSense) are both pretty widely used in the small/medium business segment, so they have plenty of relevance for learning, although probably not quite as much as Cisco or Juniper, they are significantly cheaper.