As I digressed in my last post, virtualizing pfSense wasn’t as difficult as I expected. From what I’d read online I was afraid it would have some adverse affect on network performance, especially considering most of my “infrastructure” is reclaimed, second-hand, or otherwise cast-off from production use. It fully appears, however, that these fears were unfounded (standard Spectrum cable, don’t judge): Physical 32bit Xen Virtualized 64bit Barely noticeable, and honestly well within the standard variance of such types of throughput tests.

Update Oct 20, 2017 As pointed out in the comments below, most of this is no longer needed since the official release of the telegraf package for pfSense 2.4 and above. I'm still leaving it up for posterity. If any of the pfSense folks read this, some extra configuration options on the settings page for the plugin would be nice to see; but otherwise works like a charm. If you’re like me, a sexy looking dashboard is a difficult thing to look away from.