pfSense newbie: can it run in a VM and handle a 10Gb/s ISP line?
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I've got an XPenology NAS and I am planning to run a pfSense Virtual Machine to handle my (10 GbE) LAN/WLAN.
Giving for granted that I've a powerfull enough hardware would there still be a lack of performance anyhow forcing me run a dedicate pfSense hardware?
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@cr4z33 small chance that normal people have "powerfull enough hardware" to get 10gbit wirespeed inside a vm.
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@heper can you please "decrypt" what you wrote for me...?
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like this?
https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=ga&text=small%20chance%20that%20normal%20people%20have%20%22powerfull%20enough%20hardware%22%20to%20get%2010gbit%20wirespeed%20inside%20a%20vm.&op=translate -
@cr4z33 If WLAN means internet to you, the answer is probably no. The underlying OS is for now somewhat limited.
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@bob-dig hmm alright thanks.
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@cr4z33 Although I am only talking about one connection, which probably will be hard to saturate "in the internet" anyways. When it comes to multiple concurrent connections it might be good enough, I don't know. But they (netgate) do have another product for that, which is not free for commercial use and is for professionals, no easy GUI, as far as I know.
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S stephenw10 moved this topic from Problems Installing or Upgrading pfSense Software on Oct 27, 2022, 4:35 PM
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Mmm, WLAN usually mean wireless to me. I assume you don't mean that here?
It's possible to pass 10Gbps through a pfSense VM but you need a pretty powerful hypervisor to do it. I think I've only seen it done on ESXi with vmx NICs too.
Steve
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@stephenw10 said in pfSense newbie: can it run in a VM and handle a 10Gb/s ISP line?:
WLAN usually mean wireless to me
With everyone else on the planet as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_LAN
But lets assume that was a typo and they meant wan.. Man that better be one hell of a box.. What are the specs of this hardware your going to run the VM on?
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Look for refurbished IBM servers and they can easily push 10gbit/s in vm's.
I run them with vm's with 32GB ram and 8 cores.
Easily push wirespeed.... with Iperf
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What hypervisor do you use for that?
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@stephenw10 I would be surprised if its the virtual machine manager that comes with DSM, the XPenology is a boot loader for running DSM on non synology hardware. Its not known for its speedy anything, now that might be to the very limited specs of most of the synology boxes - but again maybe on some better hardware?
I would think its going to be have to be a pretty beefy box..
edit: I can push/pull low 900s to a vm running on my ds918+ but I would have move some stuff around to see if can get 2.5ge out of it. I can easy do good 2.37gbps hardware to hardware with usb nic on the ds918+ but have serious doubts I could get anywhere close to 10ge.. even if I could put a hardware nic in the ds918+ which you can't do..
I'm pretty sure heper comment was to the effect that your typical user prob not going to have the hardware to be able to do 10ge via VM.. If we had some specs on this box would be able to make a more educated guess if 10ge is possible.
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Yes, me too. But I recall being surprised any VM could push 10G when I first saw it. That was some time ago and I can't be sure what the hypervisor being used was. I think it was ESXi though.
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@stephenw10 ESXi
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Nice. I assume you need the multiqueue blacklist tweak for vmxnet NICs to reach that?
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Woah lots of questions here, but my bad I had actually to say what hardware I was using and it's nothing special so I guess myself it won't nearly match the needed specs right...?
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INTEL Core i3-4130
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2x8GB DDR4 RAM
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INTEL X540-T2 NIC card
WLAN: yes I meant Wi-Fi, but all I want is to secure manage the wireless IP cameras and Synology Surveillance Station traffic.
Seeing your posts about beefy hardware needed I wonder if a Netgate 6100 would be actually able to carry all the load needed here?
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@stephenw10 I dont use passthrough nics...
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@Cool_Corona
Right but if you use vmxnet NICs to the VM you need to disable the blacklist to get pfSense to use multiple queues on them. Which I would expect to be required to pass 10Gbps.@Cr4z33
No I would not expect an i3-4130 to pass that as a hypervisor. Though it may get close I've never tried ESXi on something like that.And no I would not expect to see 10Gbps through a 6100 if it's NATing and filtering the traffic. Especially if that's a single stream TCP test.
Steve
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@cr4z33 You will not reach 10gbit/s on the hardware.
You need Xeon CPU's.
We run this in our testrigs to compare opnsense to pfsense
https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/iot/1u/sys-510d-10c-fn6p
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@stephenw10 On current ESXi its not needed and on the older ones it hardly made a difference.