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    pfSense newbie: can it run in a VM and handle a 10Gb/s ISP line?

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
    newbievirtualmachine10gbase-t
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    • Cool_CoronaC
      Cool_Corona
      last edited by

      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

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
      • stephenw10S
        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
        last edited by

        What hypervisor do you use for that?

        johnpozJ Cool_CoronaC 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • johnpozJ
          johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator @stephenw10
          last edited by johnpoz

          @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.

          An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
          If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
          Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
          SG-4860 24.11 | Lab VMs 2.8, 24.11

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • stephenw10S
            stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
            last edited by

            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.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • Cool_CoronaC
              Cool_Corona @stephenw10
              last edited by

              @stephenw10 ESXi

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • stephenw10S
                stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                last edited by

                Nice. I assume you need the multiqueue blacklist tweak for vmxnet NICs to reach that?

                Cool_CoronaC 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • Cr4z33C
                  Cr4z33
                  last edited by Cr4z33

                  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...? 😂

                  • INTEL Core i3-4130

                  • 2x8GB DDR4 RAM

                  • 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? 🤔

                  Cool_CoronaC 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • Cool_CoronaC
                    Cool_Corona @stephenw10
                    last edited by

                    @stephenw10 I dont use passthrough nics...

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • stephenw10S
                      stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                      last edited by

                      @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

                      Cool_CoronaC 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • Cool_CoronaC
                        Cool_Corona @Cr4z33
                        last edited by

                        @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

                        Cr4z33C 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                        • Cool_CoronaC
                          Cool_Corona @stephenw10
                          last edited by

                          @stephenw10 On current ESXi its not needed and on the older ones it hardly made a difference.

                          stephenw10S 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • Cr4z33C
                            Cr4z33 @Cool_Corona
                            last edited by

                            @cool_corona cheers mate gonna see if I can find a deal on eBay then for some used unit.

                            Cool_CoronaC 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • Cool_CoronaC
                              Cool_Corona @Cr4z33
                              last edited by

                              @cr4z33 https://www.serverworlds.com/refurbished-lenovo-x3550-m5-sff-configured-to-order-8869-ac1/

                              Cr4z33C 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • provelsP
                                provels
                                last edited by

                                FWIW, even my ancient 2012R2 Hyper-V VM on a 14 year old host shows the logical interface as 10G, but I think you would need a very high power host to come near the packet processing power needed. Free standing host would be better. Then again, I can't even imagine needing 10G unless I had thousands of users anyway. But I'm a dinosaur.
                                ff41ff25-775d-4ecf-bc54-c84a1d42fc7d-image.png

                                Peder

                                MAIN - pfSense+ 24.11-RELEASE - Adlink MXE-5401, i7, 16 GB RAM, 64 GB SSD. 500 GB HDD for SyslogNG
                                BACKUP - pfSense+ 23.01-RELEASE - Hyper-V Virtual Machine, Gen 1, 2 v-CPUs, 3 GB RAM, 8GB VHDX (Dynamic)

                                Cool_CoronaC 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                • Cool_CoronaC
                                  Cool_Corona @provels
                                  last edited by

                                  @provels You need new nics and xeon's to reach it... and not running it in a Hyper-V environment.

                                  provelsP 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                  • stephenw10S
                                    stephenw10 Netgate Administrator @Cool_Corona
                                    last edited by

                                    @cool_corona said in pfSense newbie: can it run in a VM and handle a 10Gb/s ISP line?:

                                    on the older ones it hardly made a difference.

                                    Hmm, that's very much not been my experience when working with customers virtual installs. Setting that value usually dramatically increased throughput or reduced per core CPU loading. Though that won't be the case in FreeBSD main builds.

                                    Steve

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                                    • provelsP
                                      provels @Cool_Corona
                                      last edited by

                                      @cool_corona said in pfSense newbie: can it run in a VM and handle a 10Gb/s ISP line?:

                                      @provels You need new nics and xeon's to reach it... and not running it in a Hyper-V environment.

                                      Would be less than worthless on my 75Mb WAN, my GB LAN and 54Mb WLAN...

                                      Peder

                                      MAIN - pfSense+ 24.11-RELEASE - Adlink MXE-5401, i7, 16 GB RAM, 64 GB SSD. 500 GB HDD for SyslogNG
                                      BACKUP - pfSense+ 23.01-RELEASE - Hyper-V Virtual Machine, Gen 1, 2 v-CPUs, 3 GB RAM, 8GB VHDX (Dynamic)

                                      Cool_CoronaC 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                      • Cool_CoronaC
                                        Cool_Corona @provels
                                        last edited by

                                        @provels Yeah...

                                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                        • Cr4z33C
                                          Cr4z33
                                          last edited by

                                          This post is deleted!
                                          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                          • Cr4z33C
                                            Cr4z33 @Cool_Corona
                                            last edited by

                                            @cool_corona said in pfSense newbie: can it run in a VM and handle a 10Gb/s ISP line?:

                                            @cr4z33 https://www.serverworlds.com/refurbished-lenovo-x3550-m5-sff-configured-to-order-8869-ac1/

                                            Thanks mate, but living in the EU that would cost me too much hehe.

                                            I have however found a refurbished Supermicro CSE815 - X10SLH-LN6TF / N6-ST031 for quite a very interesting price.

                                            Would that finally be good for my needs?
                                            Might also be a good purchase to start learning networking in a more serious way for me.

                                            Cool_CoronaC 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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