Network port splitting ??

stephenw10

pfSense would need to see it as separate NICs. The Mellenox NICs can do some unusual things...so...maybe. I've never seen it done. Some firmware setting perhaps.
You won't pass 25Gbps though. You'd be better trying to get 10GbE interfaces out of it.

Steve

_Adrian_

@stephenw10

Im looking at this switch USW-Pro-Aggregation as my top of rack switch followed by a USW-Pro-48-PoE.

This way all my gaming and streaming gear is on a high speed network while my typical users ( voip, ap, security cameras) can ride the gigabit ports on the tier below.

stephenw10

Ok, well having never run a 25G link in pfSense I can't really recommend any NICs for that. You're welcome to try though.

_Adrian_

@stephenw10 i will definitely attempt it once my main switch arrives. I am using a mellanox branded 2M DAC cable. I really need to do some home work, but figured someone here has tried it before so it was worth a shot in the dark

stephenw10

I'm sure someone has. We occasionally get questions about it but I'm not sure a report of success.
Let me check....

Mmm, there are NICs supported by bnxt(4) and ice(4) for example but I'm not seeing any reports of 100% success. There are VLAN issues in the current bnxt driver for example.

_Adrian_

@stephenw10 That in a way is good news as I'm not planning to run VLANS lol

stephenw10

If you have any choice I'd probably look at one of the Intel 800 series NICs supported by the ice(4) driver:
https://github.com/pfsense/FreeBSD-src/blob/devel-12/sys/dev/ice/ice_common.c#L57

Even if it's not supported now it's likely to be the best supported hardware in FreeBSD.

But if you have the Mellanox NIC already you may as well test it.

Steve

_Adrian_

@stephenw10 heres the Nvidia support site for the mellanox card ( which is now owned by Nvidia )

I mean worse case and scenario I can always bump it down to 25Gbps and use active failover from my pfsense box to my main switch.

stephenw10

That card appears to be supported:
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=mlx5en&sektion=4&apropos=0&manpath=FreeBSD+12.3-stable#HARDWARE
I've just never seen anyone attempt to use it with pfSense directly.

_Adrian_

@stephenw10 well... here goes nothing lol

stephenw10