Netgate 7100 1U - 10G speeds and expansion

alekslyse

I bought a used 7100 that has been unsused. Got it for a very good price so in general it was a good buy, but I do have some questions.

First this router got 2x 10G SPF ports, and the regular RJ45 is by default setup as a switch. I tried to check how much I could pull out of the 10G locally and it caps at around 1.1-1.5G on one stream if iperf, far under 10G. I know people have tuned the settings, offload, and MTU on pfsense to get better performance. Is it any best practise that is current to get some more performance out of it?
Is it any 10-40G expansion cards that work with netgear equipment? I have a Mellanox 10/40G card here, and plugged it in. No problem with its fit or anything, but turning on the router nothing is happening, just a black screen on the console. Anyone got that card to work, or is it any cards that is known to work?
When looking at the mainboard of the router I see things like a SIM slot, and on the back it seems to be 3 expansion slots. One is for a SATA NVME, that I installed to not use the EMMC, but I assume the other two would be for something else, like a sim modem? Does anyone know how to get the SIM card to work on those routers?

rcoleman-netgate

@alekslyse said in Netgate 7100 1U - 10G speeds and expansion:

One is for a SATA NVME

mSATA M.2, not NVMe.

alekslyse

@rcoleman-netgate

Yes you are right, I misspoke. I got the sata m2 and it works with no issue. The other two slots is not mentioned in the docs I think

stephenw10

Of the two mPCIe slots, J33 and J34, only J34 can be used for a cell modem. It is connected to USB and the SIM card slot.

Steve

tman222

@alekslyse - For your iperf testing, did you test through the firewall or was the firewall used has an endpoint? If it's the latter, do your speed results change if you test through the firewall (i.e. using two hosts in different networks/subnets)?

As for network expansion cards, Intel is usually recommended here. I've personally used Chelsio network cards with pfSense for a number of years with no trouble and great performance.

Hope this helps.

alekslyse

@tman222 said in Netgate 7100 1U - 10G speeds and expansion:

@alekslyse - For your iperf testing, did you test through the firewall or was the firewall used has an endpoint? If it's the latter, do your speed results change if you test through the firewall (i.e. using two hosts in different networks/subnets)?

As for network expansion cards, Intel is usually recommended here. I've personally used Chelsio network cards with pfSense for a number of years with no trouble and great performance.

Hope this helps.

I tested on the same VLAN so that should not hit the firewall, BUT when I look at the official benchmarks from netgate its rated to over 9gbit though the firewall with iperf. How is it that its impossible to get anywhere close?

Here is the official spec benchmarks:

L3 Forwarding
IPERF3 Traffic: 18.55 Gbps
IMIX Traffic: 5.84 Gbps
Firewall
(10k ACLs)
IPERF3 Traffic: 9.14 Gbps
IMIX Traffic: 2.67 Gbps

AndyRH

@alekslyse I am a little confused. You tested on the same VLAN and did not get the speed you expected and you are asking how to get 9Gb through the firewall and you have not tested through the firewall. Did I restate that correctly?
If I did, you have no hope of getting 9Gb through the firewall if your test systems cannot get 9Gb on the LAN.
If I made an error please help me understand.

stephenw10

I expect to see something in the 3-4Gbps range between the two ix (SFP+) NICs on the 7100 if nothing is restricting it.

GeorgeCZ58

Are you able to try this on 22.05 pfsense+ edition? I have some strange issues with 7100 on >=23 edition. Will be good to give it try.

alekslyse

I have kinda given up. After talking to two people at Netgate TAC its confirmed that this router can NO do 10gbit, and not even close. If you are going to do anything real world that include the firewall, vlans etc. it will give you 2-3 git at MOST on a good day. The hardware is just not capable of anything else. This is the numbers Netgate is giving me, but most plausible the hardware caps out at around 1.5gbit if you are running from LAN to WAN with firewall and some packet analyzing on.