pfSense and OpenVPN performance recommendations

[PnoT]

I've recently moved into an area where I can get 500/500 for home usage and wanted something to handle heavy OpenVPN traffic at or around those speeds. My current Asus home router is using selective routing to accomplish tasks but it chokes out at about 1.6MBs. In digging through forums here and on the pfSense site I see that anything close to those numbers require Intel QuickAssist and the rangley boards look like they fit the bill.

My goals are as follows:

1. Low Power usage
2. Furture proofing in terms of being able to add additional hardware (10Gb) or services such as Hyper-V workloads
3. OpenVPN speeds
4. Consolidate another piece of hardware into my server rack
5. Low noise levels

My interests have been mostly focuses on two boards being the Supermicro A1SRI-2758F & A1SRM-LN7F-2758 that Patrick has reviewed. I think from a virtualization standpoint they would perform stellar with a PDC/BDC or any other VM and could potentially lower my high watt server footprint a bit. My home rack setup pulls 970W currently and minimizing that, in any fashion, would be nice.

I'm also looking at a couple of the 1U cases from Supermicro as well but wasn't sure how loud some of those fans are.

I would love to hear pro / cons for each of these from members that have used them and whether or not I need 7 ports or not. I'm super new to pfSense so there are scenarios in which I haven't even thought about that would come up in a discussion such as this.

 

[JimPhreak]

I've recently moved into an area where I can get 500/500 for home usage and wanted something to handle heavy OpenVPN traffic at or around those speeds. My current Asus home router is using selective routing to accomplish tasks but it chokes out at about 1.6MBs. In digging through forums here and on the pfSense site I see that anything close to those numbers require Intel QuickAssist and the rangley boards look like they fit the bill.

My goals are as follows:

1. Low Power usage
2. Furture proofing in terms of being able to add additional hardware (10Gb) or services such as Hyper-V workloads
3. OpenVPN speeds
4. Consolidate another piece of hardware into my server rack
5. Low noise levels

My interests have been mostly focuses on two boards being the Supermicro A1SRI-2758F & A1SRM-LN7F-2758 that Patrick has reviewed. I think from a virtualization standpoint they would perform stellar with a PDC/BDC or any other VM and could potentially lower my high watt server footprint a bit. My home rack setup pulls 970W currently and minimizing that, in any fashion, would be nice.

I'm also looking at a couple of the 1U cases from Supermicro as well but wasn't sure how loud some of those fans are.

I would love to hear pro / cons for each of these from members that have used them and whether or not I need 7 ports or not. I'm super new to pfSense so there are scenarios in which I haven't even thought about that would come up in a discussion such as this.

I just built a pfSense box with the 2558 CPU (quadcore) instead of the 8-core 2778. I use OpenVPN over my 150Mbps connection and it works great. CPU doesn't go above 25% when I max out my connection over the VPN. So from a CPU standpoint I think you'll be in good shape with the 2758. As for the NICs, I don't need any more than the 4 I got on my board (A1SRi-2558F) so I'll wait for someone else to chime in on that.

 

[PnoT]

I just built a pfSense box with the 2558 CPU (quadcore) instead of the 8-core 2778. I use OpenVPN over my 150Mbps connection and it works great. CPU doesn't go above 25% when I max out my connection over the VPN. So from a CPU standpoint I think you'll be in good shape with the 2758. As for the NICs, I don't need any more than the 4 I got on my board (A1SRi-2558F) so I'll wait for someone else to chime in on that.

I know we were talking about your setup and I'm glad that you've got it working.. congrats!

If the CPU is ~25% for 150Mbps and it scaled then ~75% for 500Mbps would seem about right? I wonder how pfSense would scale with the additional 4 cpus?

Btw, what case did you wind up with and are you happy with it?

 

[JimPhreak]

I know we were talking about your setup and I'm glad that you've got it working.. congrats!

If the CPU is ~25% for 150Mbps and it scaled then ~75% for 500Mbps would seem about right? I wonder how pfSense would scale with the additional 4 cpus?

Btw, what case did you wind up with and are you happy with it?

Oh I totally didn't realize that was you PnoT haha, didn't even look at the username.

Yea I'm not sure how well it would scale but I'd imagine your CPU wouldn't hit much more than 50-60%. Not to mention that once OpenVPN releases a version that takes advantage of AES-NI with Quick Assist, you'll see an even bigger improvement in CPU efficiency.