Hardware upgrade required or not?
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I see that your using ESXI .. how do you find it? I mean was it easy to setup? and if your using free version, what is the limitations , i just cant seem to get a concise data. I know it not correct forum but i was curious.
I love it. That said, I'm an IT professional and have been using it extensively for the past 10 years or so, so I'm very comfortable setting it up and managing it. For home use, the limitations of the free version really don't matter. If I had a faster WAN connection (I'm 50x5 or so) then I'd use a dedicated pfSense box, but my current VM handles full speed with PIA OpenVPN no problems and allows me to run 8 or so other low consumption VMs for stuff like DNS, pi-hole, Unifi controller, Crashplan, Subsonic, dedicated torrent box, etc.
EDIT: regarding limitations of the free version of ESXi, 32GB of RAM on the host used to be a limit but I believe that has been removed in the 6.x versions. I'd use it on your Xeon system with confidence, except that I always recommend hardware RAID (for safety if not performance). If that's not an option, a good SSD will be more reliable (and MUCH faster) than any spinning disk. At home, I don't have disk redundancy on my ESXi system, but I do back up anything important nightly. This includes my pfSense config, and essential config data from the more important Linux VMs. I have a separate storage "server" (really a Sheevaplug with a Drobo) that hosts all of my essential data, and that gets backed up constantly by Crashplan on an VM on the ESXi box. And, anything important on the ESXi box runs from the SSD, mostly for reliability reasons rather than for performance.
Sorry if that's long-winded, just want to make sure I don't give hasty advice. :)
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My own P4 based system could push ~350Mbps and that was a single core bog standard CPU.
If you exhaust the RAM and start swapping performance is destroyed though especially with whatever ancient slow disk is probably in that. It's easy to eat RAM with Snort and Squid if you just enable everything.
I might still be running that box were it not for that fact that all the capacitors died on the motherboard and it failed to post. That alone is good reason to upgrade.
Steve