Pfsense on dell R620

paoloc

Hi all
I'm buying a server dell R620 with this hardware:

Processore Intel Xeon E5-2640 v2, 2.0 GHz, 8 core
32GB DDR3 1600MT/s
Raid PERC H710
2x300GB SAS 10000 rpm 2.5" Energy Smart HD Hot Plug Fully Assembled
Broadcom 5720 quad-port 1GbE Base-T

I'm not sure that the broadcom can be supported from pfsense. Had anyone any experience on that

Paolo

thisis789

im fairly certain they will work
i have a dell power edge 860 g2 as my pfsense box and it has a pair of broadcom NetXtreme GBE and they work fine with out any type of additional files!
but im curious on what you will be doing on your firewall to need some much power 16 threads and 32 GB?

Good luck!

stephenw10

I agree, you will struggle to fully use that hardware. What do you have planned?

Steve

jasonlitka

To echo what the others have been saying, unless you are planning on running Snort on 8 or 10 interfaces, you are going to be much better off buying a CPU with fewer cores but a much higher clock speed. Something like the E5-2637 V2 would get you more throughput and the price should be about the same (I personally prefer the E3-series CPUs because they are available with a much higher clock speed than the reasonably-priced E5 chips).

To be honest though, unless you're trying to push > 1 Gbit/s through a VPN tunnel or something similar, both are overkill. What are you trying to do?

paoloc

Hi all
I'm taking this hardware because it's a part of a bundle for the public administration in Italy and I can't modify it

thank you all for your response
Paolo

stephenw10

Consider running it as a VM host with pfSense running vitualized. At least you can then use some of the rest of the resources for other VMs if you want to.

Steve

edinburgh1874

Have one deployed at a remote site, with about 30 users.

It's quiet, runs cool and doesn't blink an eye at traffic (1 -2% CPU usage).

Running traffic shaper, snort p2p rules, squid, bandwidthd and site to site openvpn.

Everything works perfectly, but it probably is overkill for low traffic.

Remember to update the firmware before you deploy it, Dell Repository Manager will build you a bootable CD that updates everything on the server.

adam65535

I am using an R320 but I had to disable the Broadcom 5720 onboard nics with pfsense 2.0.3. I did not try enabling the 5720 nics on pfsense 2.1 or pfsense 2.1.1 PRERELEASE yet.