Can QuickAssist be virtualized on Rangeley (C2758) ?
-
Greetings,
For an upcoming home server, I want to use pfsense 2.2.
As my bandwith needs are moderate, I thought about using pfsense in a VM. The box would also do NAS duties and maybe low volume web server through other VMs.The hardware I got is a SuperMicro A1SRi-2758F, going into a big case. As the Rangeley C2758 processor has QuickAssist, I wondered if there was any way QA can run on a VM or it needs absolutely to run on the bare metal.
Hypervisor would probably be ESXi, which I am not familiar with. So far I have only played with Hyper-V, but I do not want to have to reboot the whole machine for an OS patch …
Is there another OS agnostic hypervisor that would be more appropriate ?Thank you!
-
Hello,
As the Rangeley C2758 processor has QuickAssist, I wondered
I would be looking further to AES-NI inside of the C2758, because Intel QA is not supported under
FreeBSD and then also not in pfSense too. So the AES-NI function will be more interesting for
pfSense users as I see it right now. -
QA will hopefully be supported in a future release
and yes, a VM should be able to access same.
-
a VM should be able to access same.
This is not so obvious for two reasons:
-
Rangeley does NOT support Vt-d based peripheral virtualization.
-
The underlying co-processing HW may have very deep buffers. I was not able to find a good description of Rangeley's QA HW architecture.
If a VM can access the QA hardware, it may end up that QA would be dedicated to that one and only one VM… I don't know, I am a newbie to both pfsense and ESXi :P
Intel QA is not supported under FreeBSD and then also not in pfSense too.
From previous posts by gonzopancho, I suspect prototypes of pfsense may already run QA on the bare metal of https://www.pfsense.org/hardware/pfsense-store.html#c2758
-
-
From previous posts by gonzopancho, I suspect prototypes of pfsense may already run QA on the bare metal of https://www.pfsense.org/hardware/pfsense-store.html#c2758
It can be but is also only guesswork and nothing anyone can trust really on, so as I see it
like in other posts here in the forum also where explained, better buy a CPU that comes
with AES-NI and if this CPU will also comes with Intel QA, it might be nice to have for
the future usage, but once more again nothing I would count on!For the ESXi it would at the time the best choice to go with a Intel Xeon E3 or E5
together with ECC RAM, to build a stable box that is also sorted by AES-NI and VD-T
assets.For sure I personally would really prefer to buy a crypto accelerator card likes the Exar DX-1700
Series and I must not think about all this things.