Navigation

    Netgate Discussion Forum
    • Register
    • Login
    • Search
    • Categories
    • Recent
    • Tags
    • Popular
    • Users
    • Search

    Virtualbox / Dual Paravirtualized nics slower than normal bridged.

    Virtualization
    1
    1
    994
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as topic
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with topic management privileges can see it.
    • N
      Nick99 last edited by

      At home I have been very successfully running pfSense in a virtual machine on a Win 7 machine that doubles as a HTPC for a few years.

      I use pfSense principally so that I can route PC's on my home net work over a VPN using OpenVPN aes-256-cbc. The newly released Virtualbox 5.0 now offers aes-ni hardware acceleration to guests such as pfSense. As Virtualbox also runs as a service and VMware player doesn't I thought I would try Virtualbox.

      Virtualbox setup
      Host Win 7
      Guest pfSense
      CPU Intel Sandbridge 2500k
      NIC HP Intel Pro/1000 PT dual.

      The initial set up was relatively straightforward, the only hiccup was that I needed to give 3 cores to the pfSense virtual machine in order to achieve the expected 150Mb/s speeds over the VPN. Needless to say it was slamming the CPU.

      My guess for this poor performance was the virtualised bridged NICs. As my dual gigabit nic card was only used by pfSense I thought I would get a performance boost by setting the Virtualbox bridged network adapters to Paravirtualized Network (virtio-net). This was relatively easy to set up and pfSense worked using the freebsd virtio nic drivers (I checked in /var/log/dmesg.boot).

      All well and good but now instead of 150 Mb/s over the VPN I get 40Mb/s. Without the VPN I only get 100 Mb/s when I expect 160 Mb/s. If I set only one of the NICs to paravirtualized I get 80Mb/s over the VPN.

      Why would I get massively poorer performance using paravirtualized nics?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • First post
        Last post

      Products

      • Platform Overview
      • TNSR
      • pfSense Plus
      • Appliances

      Services

      • Training
      • Professional Services

      Support

      • Subscription Plans
      • Contact Support
      • Product Lifecycle
      • Documentation

      News

      • Media Coverage
      • Press
      • Events

      Resources

      • Blog
      • FAQ
      • Find a Partner
      • Resource Library
      • Security Information

      Company

      • About Us
      • Careers
      • Partners
      • Contact Us
      • Legal
      Our Mission

      We provide leading-edge network security at a fair price - regardless of organizational size or network sophistication. We believe that an open-source security model offers disruptive pricing along with the agility required to quickly address emerging threats.

      Subscribe to our Newsletter

      Product information, software announcements, and special offers. See our newsletter archive to sign up for future newsletters and to read past announcements.

      © 2021 Rubicon Communications, LLC | Privacy Policy