Opinion on Hardware
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I am currently running PFSense on an Intel Atom D2500, Intel D2500CCE MB. I have 4Gb of ram installed and I am running it as an OpenVPN Client with Snort, and HFSC Traffic Shaping. I would like to be able to run Dansguardian and Squid as well to limit what my kids see online. I am connected to Comcast with a 105/20 Mbps connection.
So now that you know what I have and what I'm doing on it I am considering upgrading to a Supermicro A1SRI-2558-F-0 with a C2558 Atom CPU and 4 Gb DDR3 ECC ram.
MB : http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HS4NLHA/ref=ox_sc_act_title_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
RAM : http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CLBJP3E/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
Any thoughts on this…
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Seems fine.
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Seems fine.
My main thing is this going to be total overkill and I should just keep the system I have? I think this new system will go a long ways towards long term viability and lots of available options in the future.
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Well - Overkill is relative.
If the money isn't an issue, its not too much overkill. It will leave you headroom to do more later if your speeds increase or you want more function.
8 cores would be huge over kill. I could get away with 2 celeron cores for this build. Its not bad.
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Well - Overkill is relative.
If the money isn't an issue, its not too much overkill. It will leave you headroom to do more later if your speeds increase or you want more function.
8 cores would be huge over kill. I could get away with 2 celeron cores for this build. Its not bad.
Thank you! I wanted to step up from the older Atom to a Rangely. This should last me a while.
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Yeah - Some people would say go for the 8 core…
I'm not sure what the price difference is.
I'm running a 10 year old athlon X2 in one place (its actually the one I use most personally, mainly due to its IP address)
I have a pretty fast fiber connection there and I don't think I've seen it past 15% or so. CPU utilization.
I think this 4 core will be fine. Is buying from the pfsense store an option?
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Yeah - Some people would say go for the 8 core…
I'm not sure what the price difference is.
I'm running a 10 year old athlon X2 in one place (its actually the one I use most personally, mainly due to its IP address)
I have a pretty fast fiber connection there and I don't think I've seen it past 15% or so. CPU utilization.
I think this 4 core will be fine. Is buying from the pfsense store an option?
Price difference is about $100. The PfSense store does not have components, at least not that I have seen. I do know the mid level hardware they sell for $1500 has the same motherboard that I'm looking at using with a Supermicro 1u chassis. If I wasn't a tinkerer that likes to build it myself I would buy their pre built appliances.
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The 8 core model might be a good choice if you have other services you would also like to run in VMs on the same box. Depends if you can utilize 8 cores well.
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The 8 core model might be a good choice if you have other services you would also like to run in VMs on the same box. Depends if you can utilize 8 cores well.
I have another box for VM's, thinking about getting a 8 core some time in the next year for my VMs. I would like to transition my FreeNas box and Xen Server to 8 core Avatons. I wanted to keep my firewall on bare metal to help prevent any kind of intrusion but the idea of running pfsense in a VM does have a lot of merit for web traffic and some other services that would benefit from the low latency. I may have to think on this. I have to wait until the middle of the month to purchase the new hardware anyway so maybe this is a good option for me.
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For me, I base my decisions on discretionary spending limits. How much can I afford to spend responsibly on such things. For me, that number is pretty low so I tend to reuse old hardware. Over time a low power box will pay for its self though. I do get annoyed at the idea of spending alot of money to see my CPU idling all the time. I prefer to have a will utilized CPU within limits. I don't want it maxed out all the time or at crucial times but I do want it well used.
I could use one of those 8 core boxes myself but my 4 core extreme refuses to die, so I will keep using that til it does.
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For me, I base my decisions on discretionary spending limits. How much can I afford to spend responsibly on such things. For me, that number is pretty low so I tend to reuse old hardware. Over time a low power box will pay for its self though. I do get annoyed at the idea of spending alot of money to see my CPU idling all the time. I prefer to have a will utilized CPU within limits. I don't want it maxed out all the time or at crucial times but I do want it well used.
I could use one of those 8 core boxes myself but my 4 core extreme refuses to die, so I will keep using that til it does.
I just sold a bunch of hardware that I had laying around unused on eBay and the money I made is going to this upgrade. All of my homelab has been purchased second hand with the only new components being the Hard drives in my FreeNas Server.
I have a Dual E5410 Xeon 1u rig that is for virtualization and a single X3440 for FreeNas. The Dual rig is uses quite a bit of power but I think I could repurpose this rig to just mySQL with 15k SAS Raid 5 and keep the NAS as it is. A 8 Core Avaton could easily handle the VM load I would have it running along with pfsense.
Do you know if there is a performance difference between VMWare and Xen when running pfsense. I was leaning towards Xen just for being opensource.
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I know the Xen users have been screaming and pulling their hair out since pfsense 2.2 release…. (-;
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I know the Xen users have been screaming and pulling their hair out since pfsense 2.2 release…. (-;
VMWare it is! ;D
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Yeah - I've been saying "Thank God I'm not using XEN" for a few days now.
EXSi is working fine for me so far. No issues.