We have a debate in our office going on whether it's necessary to get a hardware firewall or set up a virtual one on our VMWare cluster.

Our environment consists of 3 server nodes (16 cores w/ 64 GB RAM each) over 2x 1 GB switches w/ an iSCSI shared storage array.

Assuming that we would be dedicating resources to the VMWare appliances, would we have any benefit of choosing a hardware firewall over a virtual one?

If we choose to use a hardware firewall, how would a dedicated server firewall w/ something like ClearOS compare to a Cisco firewall?