100Gib NIC?
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Hey All,
I was just wondering if anyone has had one of these set up with a 100Gib nic yet. I know this is newer technology, and not something that is in the norm for most people or businesses at the moment, nor the target demographic for pfsense. This is more of a curiosity question, and a question that I may have to answer myself soon. From what I know for now, the target device will probably be a Mellanox ConnectX
-4 EN, as it is the current favorite card for some of the 100g test nodes we have out there. Yes I am aware that this sort of direction requires some research on proper motherboards and such, most of that research has been completed for currently existing nodes. This brings to the fore another question, from configurations that I have had to make to these cards on linux boxes, I assume there is a method of installing a kernel module on pfsense to accomidate these types of cards. This is actually really important as these cards come shipped from the factory configured for infiniband usage vs usage as a NIC.Thanks in advance for your input.
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I'd expect you'd have trouble finding a computer that could keep up with 100 Gb. High bandwidth network gear generally uses a lot of custom hardware to handle the processing.
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Current pfSense architecture will be the biggest limitation in achieving such speeds. We have demoed next gen "3.0" which is capable of doing 40Gbps IPsec, so far. We intend to demonstrate 100Gbps IPsec in the following months.
Here's the talk on it by our Jim Thompson https://twitter.com/NetgateUSA/status/923994053015982080
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I'd expect you'd have trouble finding a computer that could keep up with 100 Gb. High bandwidth network gear generally uses a lot of custom hardware to handle the processing.
PCI Express lanes are the real problem requiring X16, we have found a motherboard/cpu combo that has no problem pushing 100gbps. SuperMicro X10SRi-F Motherboard with a Intel Xeon E5-1630v3 is capable of doing so. So don't be afraid to try different things, this is the current configuration for our 100G test nodes. We currently have Mellanox, Broadcomm, and QLogic NICs in the field. Though the Mellanox has proven to be the more stable card at the moment (bleeding edge can be interesting at times).
Current pfSense architecture will be the biggest limitation in achieving such speeds. We have demoed next gen "3.0" which is capable of doing 40Gbps IPsec, so far. We intend to demonstrate 100Gbps IPsec in the following months.
Here's the talk on it by our Jim Thompson https://twitter.com/NetgateUSA/status/923994053015982080
Thank you, I'll give that a look. We are jumping from 10g to 100g and skipping 40g (probably)
