Pfsense Box - Single Nic verses Dual Nic setup
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The reason I'm thinking this, is because the ethernet chipset model 82567LM isn't listed http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.1R/hardware.html
The reason I listed the Elite 8000 is the stock memory is running at 1333 mhz ….. most likely couldn't see a difference .... but doesn't hurt to have a little extra SNAP!
How I will configure the computer I'm not sure what path to take at the moment. I may just install only pfsense, or ESXi and will look into other free available options. Ive have heard you need to have a raid controller for ESXi etc... so I will have to dig into it soon. Would be nice to have a VM of a full blown web server, a VM of freenas, and some flavor of linux in a VM. If that's the path running it all VM style. I will need more Mem....Might could pull the stock 2Gb modules out (1066mhz) and stick 8Gb of 1333mhz in the dc7900? Assuming HP's bios has support and a option for upping the FSB to 1333.
It will be to help protect my home based business, and of course after hours I will be doing the things geek do when he get online after work. I plan on spending much time learning pfsense to get my internet connection locked down as tight as humanly possible.
Sounds like your saying screw the dual nics, just use the on-board nic and a managed switch.
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The Intel driver in 2.0.1 is actually a patched version of what was released with FreeBSD 8.1. As such it is actually somewhere between 8.1 and 8.3 in terms of support.
You can always try the 2.1 snapshots, built on 8.3, to get further hardware support. They have been quite stable for some time. Though individual snapshots can still introduce bugs.Steve
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I use DC7700's a lot as well, they're inexpensive, available in the SFF size, takes PCI-Express x16 and x1, and available with a Core2Duo (generally a sweet spot for performance/price/wattage.)
The DC7900's and DC7700's both use DDR2 (666 to 800MHz and 533 to 800Mhz, respectively). The 8000 uses DDR3. They are different beasts. Even if you could bump up the 7900 to over 1000MHz memory speed, the increase likely wouldn't do much for you, if anything at all. All of those machines support a range of Celerons, Pentium Ds, and Core2Duos. The DC7900 and 8000 support Core2Quads, but a Quad won't help you much, pfSense generally doesn't benefit from any more than 2 cores. With a Core2Duo it's pretty rare to saturate the processing power in pfSense unless you're doing a lot of other options, such as a lot of VPN, deep packet inspection, content caching for a lot of users, etc. This isn't a desktop machine, so extra "snap", such as responsiveness in a GUI isn't a factor, it likely won't affect any kind of latency, either.
But, that's just hypothesis, feel free to test, please let us know if you do. Just remember, your local router is likely not the source of latency on the internet, it's a weakest link issue, which is usually the internet as a whole, your router probably wouldn't make a difference. It'd be kind of like making sure your driveway in your house was as fast as possible because the traffic getting to work takes a long time; you may end up spending a lot of make a very little, possibly zero, net benefit.
I still use an old Celeron 400 for my home router, although with m0n0wall, still (over 7 years running.) Being a Pentium II era machine, it has PC-100 SDRAM; a whole 128MB of it. Latency has never been a concern, and I throw a lot at it. CPU usage is rarely over 10%. If it makes you feel warm and fuzzy, feel free to go the extra mile to bump up your memory speeds. Personally, I wouldn't expend the effort to try.
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Sounds like your saying screw the dual nics, just use the on-board nic and a managed switch
No, just saying that one on-board plus three PCIe slots plus one PCI slot gets you up to five single-port NICS. How many do you want in a home office machine? ;) Sure, if you have the dual NICs already, use them but they may be more than twice the price of single-port NIC.
You don't need RAID for ESXi (at least not this scale). You also don't need at least one physical NIC for each virtual machine either. You could run pfSense and other VMs with just one NIC for your WAN connection and one for LAN.
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Wow, how did I gloss over the ESXi portion?
Like biggsy said, you don't need RAID for ESXi. There used to be a requirement for SCSI for local VMFS volumes (the volumes where virtual hard drives for your virtual machines live), but that mainly just ruled out IDE, SATA works fine. And, to re-itterate, I the DC7900 is DDR2, while you might be able to find 1333 MHz RAM in DDR2 I wouldn't expect it to work in that machine (maybe it'll clock itself down, maybe the machine will just beep at you.) The DC7900 is capable of holding 16GB of DDR2, but, 16GB of DDR2 is not cheap. We'll put it this way, it would probably be worth it to find a DDR3 machine to take advantage of the cheaper DDR3 RAM, especially when you get to higher densities. Otherwise, 8GB of DDR2 isn't scary expensive, at which point the difference between a DC7700 and DC7900 starts to fade (a 7700 will take 8GB of DDR2 just fine, I have a few of 'em with 8GB each.)
With a VM host, RAM is usually a big deal, so if you really want to run a few VMs, getting something that can take 16GB may be beneficial. If you're just running pfSense and a couple small VMs, 8 would probably be perfectly fine. On my single DC7700 with 8GB of ram I run 2x 2008 DCs, 2x XP desktop test VMs, and a 2003 server, it has about a GB free right now; CPU runs about 500MHz to 1GHz on average on a Core2Duo.
On the NICs, if it's otherwise easy to do multiple NICs, do it. It'll save configuration hassles, especially if you're not used to working with VLANs otherwise. The other thing it saves is down time in case of a switch or other failure, you can easily just swap out any old switch laying around if you don't need the VLAN support.
Like biggsy mentioned, there's no need for dual port NICs if you've got slots. A single Gb PCI-Express card will give you your 2 ports, it's unlikely that your WAN need GB (if it does, bonus to you) so a simple 10/100 PCI card is probably fine for your WAN. So, if you do end up running ESXi or any other virtualization, you can still have multiple network connections, although it's quite likely you wouldn't need them anyway.
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I just got lucky on ebay and picked up a HP 8000 Elite in mint condition for $147 …. A dc7900 would have been great, but thought I would attempt to snatch up a newer model.
I will try a single nic using a managed switch. Having gigabit connections throughout the home network, assuming everything is running full duplex in reality should be overkill :) Also assuming the onboard chips perform as the spec's state using the pfsense/FreeBSD driver.
Heck my internet connect is 30Mb/6Mb ..... LMAO ...... and a internal gigabit lan, it all should be quite SNAPPY ;D!
It will be a new learning experience setting up multiple v-lans and tags etc.... I'm sure I will end up buying the pfsense book, and hit you great guys up to help keep me flying straight.
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I just got lucky on ebay and picked up a HP 8000 Elite in mint condition for $147 …. A dc7900 would have been great, but thought I would attempt to snatch up a newer model.
I will try a single nic using a managed switch. Having gigabit connections throughout the home network, assuming everything is running full duplex in reality should be overkill :) Also assuming the onboard chips perform as the spec's state using the pfsense/FreeBSD driver.
Heck my internet connect is 30Mb/6Mb ..... LMAO ...... and a internal gigabit lan, it all should be quite SNAPPY ;D!
It will be a new learning experience setting up multiple v-lans and tags etc.... I'm sure I will end up buying the pfsense book, and hit you great guys up to help keep me flying straight.
That's a decent deal, depending on what you need, you can outfit that machine with 16GB for well under $100 (closer to $70), even for the faster of the speeds that it supports.
That may have just made it in to my budget ESXi recommendation list. A good 16GB machine for under $300 out the door isn't bad. Put a few together with a half way decent iSCSI SAN (even a good desktop with RAID and FreeNAS) and you've got the makings of a decent (non enterprise) cluster that would support HA. I had been using DC7700's with 8GB for that, previously.
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Another + might be that it seems that the 8100/8200/8300 Elite motherboards and power supplies are compatible with the same chassis as the 8000 elite. So if you loose a motherboard etc….repair it or you could if needed purchase a used 8100/8200/8300 motherboard and CPU to upgrade to a i5.
The same might could be said about the 7800/7900 series you just don't get as big of a Bang! lol
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…picked up a HP 8000 Elite in mint condition for $147
Nice buy. Hope I don't find anything like that. I've got enough machines already. Have lots of fun.
Wow, how did I gloss over the ESXi portion?
Well, I thought it might be getting off topic a bit but, since you mentioned VMs in your first response, I figured you opened the door ;D
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Nice buy. Hope I don't find anything like that. I've got enough machines already. Have lots of fun.
Price should have been around $100 :D guess it's because the time of the year.
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Well, I thought it might be getting off topic a bit but, since you mentioned VMs in your first response, I figured you opened the door ;D
Oh, I'm usually one of the first to see an opportunity to pontificate vastly on the subject of Virtualization, especially with ESX(i). I was quite surprised I missed the mention.
Nice buy. Hope I don't find anything like that. I've got enough machines already. Have lots of fun.
Price should have been around $100 :D guess it's because the time of the year.
Really? Usually closer to $100? I need to start watching out for those. Might replace some of mine with those (more ram per machine equals more work for less power usage, assuming Core2Duo or better.)
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Matguy:
Your watts and cost calculations above are way off.Using your watts difference of 52.5 try this:
52.5 watts above Atom
52.5 x 24hr per day = 1,260 watts per day
1,260 watts / 1,000 = 1.26 kwatts per day
1.26 kwatts X 365 days per year = 459.9 kwatts per Year
459.9 kwatts per year / 12 months per year = 38.325 kwatts per month
38.325 kwatts per month X $0.12 per kwatt = $4.599 per month difference
$4.599 per month difference * 12 months per year = $55.188 per year differenceClear-Pixel has already spent more in time and effort than he/she will ever recover with power savings in an area with typically priced power. Just grab a decent used notebook and hook it up. Even my old 2003 vintage DELL Inspiron 5100 with Broadcom NIC works fine. Only issue I've seen with the NIC is not being able to spoof the MAC on VLAN'ed WAN interface. Although I was able to force the MAC spoof just for the sake of doing so.
The quantities are too small for there to be any economy of scale savings.
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Matguy:
Your watts and cost calculations above are way off.Using your watts difference of 52.5 try this:
52.5 watts above Atom
52.5 x 24hr per day = 1,260 watts per day
1,260 watts / 1,000 = 1.26 kwatts per day
1.26 kwatts X 365 days per year = 459.9 kwatts per Year
459.9 kwatts per year / 12 months per year = 38.325 kwatts per month
38.325 kwatts per month X $0.12 per kwatt = $4.599 per month difference
$4.599 per month difference * 12 months per year = $55.188 per year differenceClear-Pixel has already spent more in time and effort than he/she will ever recover with power savings in an area with typically priced power. Just grab a decent used notebook and hook it up. Even my old 2003 vintage DELL Inspiron 5100 with Broadcom NIC works fine. Only issue I've seen with the NIC is not being able to spoof the MAC on VLAN'ed WAN interface. Although I was able to force the MAC spoof just for the sake of doing so.
The quantities are too small for there to be any economy of scale savings.
Good catch, it looks like I seriously fumbled something between my average wattage and my KWh/month math.
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@NOYB $0.15 per kWh here.
The main point here about power consumption is the GREEN aspect!
It's not that big of a deal at the moment, but when the government/states decline new construction permits for coal fired power plants. And existing operators shutting down plants, you will be scrambling to cut your energy cost!
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How much are you expecting electric power price to go up and when?
If things get so bad that I'd be scrambling to save a few kWh of power, computers, internet, etc. will be history.
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How much are you expecting electric power price to go up and when?
I agree 1kWH per day is probably insignificant to most "1st world" dwellers. I suspect for many dwellers of "remote, 3rd world" communities relying on solar power or generators, 1kWH per day can be very significant.
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How much are you expecting electric power price to go up and when?
This is an interesting question.
Here in the UK the average annual household electricity bill has almost doubled in the last 10 years.
See: http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/statistics/energy_stats/prices/prices.aspx#A lot of that is because for long time the price of energy in general has been kept low by North Sea gas which has now run out pretty much.
For a number of years the electricity producers here have been doing everything they can to reduce the consumption of their users. This included sending out free CFL bulbs to every household repeatedly and subsidising their cost in shops. Until very recently I could buy a CFL bulb for 11p. All of this is because they are approaching, some would argue have reached, the level of consumption at which they'll have to start building more power stations in a serious way. This is compounded by the fact that much of the existing infrastructure is now well past it's original design life. When that happens I expect the cost of electricity to rise significantly. ::)Steve
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@stephenw10 …. Well said
There are many scenarios that will be playing out over the next decade globally, as corporations/governments will have total control over the majority of commodities/services/goods etc. They will create the perfect Storm.
Need I say more?
