Reusing old hardware - sanity check
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My ISP might finally come out of the dark ages and installing fiber (1/1 Gb/s), so I thought I start preparing for replacing my trusty Asus RT-66U (Tomato) with pfSense.
I had some existing parts lying around:
- Supermicro X8SIE LGA 1156 motherboard (dual intel 82574L nic)
- Xeon X3450
- 16 GB ECC memory
- 128 GB SSD
pfSense (AMD64) installed without a problem. I'm wondering if this hardware, though "free", will be able to handle 1 Gbs LAN-WAN traffic with some headroom.
Power-wise, I'm thinking it'll be a while before I could recoup the cost of buying more efficient box (SG-2440?) in electricity bills. -
With that power you can have 2-3 vms and still have room to spare. RAM is more than needed, 6-8GB suffices even for the most resource intensive UTMs.
I would recommend installing VMware and make use of the hardware.
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not worth buying a crappy box to save money on power unless your a data centre
put some vms on that and be done with it
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I ran pfsense on very similar (1 step down cpu) setup (in an ESXi VM) for years. very stable and performs great. Add a hypervisor if it adds value for you, skip the extra complexity if it does not.