Netgate 8300 Max Clients
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I am planning for an upcoming project and speccing out hardware. Right now looking at the 8300, but am curious if there is a recommended max amount of hosts this hardware would support with DHCP. Or a max number of recommended VLANs. This project would be ~4800 hosts across 140 VLANs. Would it be better to use a third party DHCP server, or would this hardware support that many hosts without issue.
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@wmw509
Personally......I would use a separate system altogether if using DHCP or DNS. If this is a Windows project than there should already be an Active Directory controller you should be leveraging. If there isn't, i would still spin up something separately. Otherwise, if the needs of your 4800 hosts are basic enough that they need an IP assignment, than pfsense can handle no issue. -
@michmoor Thanks for the response! This will not be a windows environment, the hosts are going to be bitcoin miners, so their needs are about as basic as it gets.
I have a few sites running netgate 7100's with ~2500 hosts and that seems to work pretty well, but I know there must be a limit to what I should keep all in pfsense. This project has me debating if it would better to split some of those functions off onto other hardware.
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140 interfaces is going to present some issues in the webgui. Some areas will be slow or inconvenient to navigate but should still function OK. At >200 assigned and enabled interfaces things start to become unusable IMO. Though we have seen users with more. And the system itself will function fine with a very large number as long as you're not frequently making changes in the gui.
That doesn't really matter what hardware is running for that beyond a point.
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@stephenw10 On our existing networks running 7100's with the expansion 4 x 1gb NIC we have.....~130 VLANs or so?
The webGUI definitely doesn't run like it does on my home pfsense, but its actually pretty usable still. And once its all configured outside of some regular updates or VPN changes we really don't need to change too much. If the webGUI is the only thing that slows down its not a huge issue IMO.
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That's about the only thing I could imagine being an issue. It won't be any worse than 130 VLANs on the 7100. It should be much better than that, the 8300 is a lot more powerful!
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@stephenw10
My only thinking is you don't want to bridge any pfsense interfaces, use layer 3 routing in a larger network between interfaces. Layer 2 has a lot of baggage. The same if you are using slow communication lines. Route over them, layer 3 instead of bridging them, layer 2. At least it was that way 20 years ago with a network of 4000 Windows clients. I would think the principles would still apply for the fastest speeds on large networks.
