pfsense dell server recommendation?

jdetmold

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 1, 2011
Messages
82
So as I am setting up and administering a network for a small business and have decided to run pfsense because I have experience with it.

The network will only have 25-30 clients at a time max.
They will have 5 users who will vpn in to access the server.
Wan is 50/8 Mbps.
The network will be gigabit so I will install 2 or 3 intel pro1000's depending on mb support.

So my question concerns hardware they are a dell shop so...

Can anyone sugest a dell server for a pfsense box?
also does anyone knows if pfsense supports the SAS6iR?
if pfsense supports the on board nic I will install only 2 Pro1000's if it dosen't then I will install 3.
does not need to be rack mount

Thanks in advance!

-Jeff
 
PFsense has such a low power requirement, I think you could get by on the lowest ini terms of cpu and ram if you are set on new, and just add the network cards.

I know yeoldestonecat used to run pfsense on a PIII 700 and I've done it on an old PIII also.

I'd almost look into an atom supermicro rackmount unit. No, it's not a dell, however you are not going to need a ton of firepower.
 
I know yeoldestonecat used to run pfsense on a PIII 700 and I've done it on an old PIII also.

I've also ran it on a P2 500mhz and a P3 900mhz, both with a gig of ram. I wouldnt trust the P2 to 25-30 hosts though. We managed to break it at one of our lans.
 
I do run my pfsense box at home on a 1.6ghz dual core atom board and have had great luck with that. but when I suggested something else they said they would prefere a dell because thats what they use for their desktops and they like the service and the fact that they will overnight parts if theirs an issue.... I should mention I'm in canada and have to admit that is nice.

In the end the decision is up to me if I say no dell they will take my advice but keeping them happy is always a good thing.
 
Well I guess since it's not your money and they want dell, go dell.

I think the low end is the Dell R210/T210. R=rack T=tower. They have a dual gigabit onboard, so plop in another card and you should be good.

I got both the units we have at work from the Dell outlet.
 
Well I guess since it's not your money and they want dell, go dell.

I think the low end is the Dell R210/T210. R=rack T=tower. They have a dual gigabit onboard, so plop in another card and you should be good.

I got both the units we have at work from the Dell outlet.

ya we dont really get dell outlet in canada :( shafted again



But if anyone would like to recommend something other than Dell by all means please do so.
 
I'd check out something from supermicro, like an Atom based machine.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/1U/5015/SYS-5015A-PHF.cfm

Dual onboard intel NIC's, RAID1, only uses 200watt power supply. Seems to fit the bill.

The Dell R210's mentioned earlier can be outfitted with a Celeron or a Pentium as well.

Supermicro actually makes the mobo in my pfsense i just built and am discussing in the other thread.
 
I recently just installed pfsense on a Dell PE 1650 which is a P3 with 2GB of ram.

So far it's running great. The nice thing about this server is that it has built in monitoring. From anywhere in the house I can tell if it's still powered on. :D

If buying new, I'd just go with the lowest/cheapest server. I have not tried them but I would also suggest the Atom supermicro machines. They look like very nice appliance machines. I want to get one, or two, or three at some point.
 
Dual onboard intel NIC's, RAID1, only uses 200watt power supply. Seems to fit the bill.

the RAID1 does in fact work with pfsense? i read in one thread on here that it didn't if it does that would probably sway me.
 
Convince them that using an appliance designed for a router/firewall is smarter than trying to shove PFSense in some 1U Dell server. I love Dell products also...but.....seriously, go the Supermicro route. Get a D510 or D525 motherboard..the models with dual onboard Intel gig NICs. Get a hard drive designed for AVR/DVR use, like the Seagate Pipeline or...I forget the WD model....I think it has AV in the model number. They're designed for 24x7 use, minimum 3 year warranty, designed to run cool and quiet, low power consumption. It's the proper type of HDD to use in a firewall appliance, instead of a desktop or server drive.

Keep old router for "standby"...or..since you'd still be ahead in budget..purchase 2 of everything for your redundancy.
 
With that size user base, the Atom is plenty of power.

I've got a rather large (pfSense) install that services roughly 5 times (users, VPNs, bandwidth) of what you listed. It's on a 1 year old Xeon system and averages 0% CPU use and 0.00 load average.
 
With that size user base, the Atom is plenty of power.

I've got a rather large (pfSense) install that services roughly 5 times (users, VPNs, bandwidth) of what you listed. It's on a 1 year old Xeon system and averages 0% CPU use and 0.00 load average.

someone should write a pfsense package for F@H so that thing can do something while its doing nothing.
 
I've also ran it on a P2 500mhz and a P3 900mhz, both with a gig of ram. I wouldnt trust the P2 to 25-30 hosts though. We managed to break it at one of our lans.

do you mind telling how it broke? I thought about using my old Dell P2 400 for the our next big lan (15-25 gamers), my choices is the old dell or go way overkill with a 3GHz P4 Dell....
 
Last edited:
When I say "broke" I dont mean it physically broke. More like made it crash.

4 of us loaded up torrents that had 1000's of seeders (Avatar 1080p is good one), constantly refreshing the Stream Servers Browser, and ran speed tests from speedtest.net in 3 tabs.

It held out good for awhile then pings skyrocketed into the seconds, then evetually became unresponsive and timed out. The web admin was no longer accessable. I rebooted it but after a few mins didnt hear the pfsense bootup jingle. Got a little worried cuz we might have just ended the lan right there, but eventually it came back up.

Before the webadmin became unresponsive RAM usage and CPU were all maxed out.

Something to keep in mind. I have FiOS 15/5. At 500mhz the CPU would bounce off 100% all the time during max download speeds even from just one person. Throughput affects CPU, number of connections in the state table affects ram.

The pfsense website claims a 266mhz CPU can handle up to 20Mbps, but I'm skeptical.

If you read my other thread about the 2.0 beta I have a 2.13ghz C2D and 4GB ram. This LAN I hope to have 11pc/laptops and a few VM's running all doing the same test. This time with QoS and traffic analyzing packages installed (which should increase CPU usage even more. I kinda wanna break it again, but apart of me also wants to stand back and watch pfsense laugh at our feeble attempts.
 
When I say "broke" I dont mean it physically broke. More like made it crash.

4 of us loaded up torrents that had 1000's of seeders (Avatar 1080p is good one), constantly refreshing the Stream Servers Browser, and ran speed tests from speedtest.net in 3 tabs.

It held out good for awhile then pings skyrocketed into the seconds, then evetually became unresponsive and timed out. The web admin was no longer accessable. I rebooted it but after a few mins didnt hear the pfsense bootup jingle. Got a little worried cuz we might have just ended the lan right there, but eventually it came back up.

Before the webadmin became unresponsive RAM usage and CPU were all maxed out.

Something to keep in mind. I have FiOS 15/5. At 500mhz the CPU would bounce off 100% all the time during max download speeds even from just one person. Throughput affects CPU, number of connections in the state table affects ram.

The pfsense website claims a 266mhz CPU can handle up to 20Mbps, but I'm skeptical.

If you read my other thread about the 2.0 beta I have a 2.13ghz C2D and 4GB ram. This LAN I hope to have 11pc/laptops and a few VM's running all doing the same test. This time with QoS and traffic analyzing packages installed (which should increase CPU usage even more. I kinda wanna break it again, but apart of me also wants to stand back and watch pfsense laugh at our feeble attempts.

It sounds to me like your heavy load just brought forth a piece of bad hardware in an old system.
 
Most likely. These are considerations one has to think about when using old hardware.
 
When I say "broke" I dont mean it physically broke. More like made it crash.

4 of us loaded up torrents that had 1000's of seeders (Avatar 1080p is good one), constantly refreshing the Stream Servers Browser, and ran speed tests from speedtest.net in 3 tabs.

What NICs were in it? HUUUUUUUGE difference depending on what kinda NICs you used.
 
Had to dig through the closet and I can confirm they are both intel NIC's

One is a gd82559, the other is sb82558b.

Honestly couldnt tell you if they were any good. However if i remember correctly they were recommended to me in this forum by direct links from ebay. So they f'in better be!!!! :p

Wish I had low profile brackets for these, id use it them in my new build.
 
Digging up a stale thread..

Looking at similar - 60 user 20/20, maybe 3-4 concurrent VPN users.

Would the D525 work? I'm planning on doing content filtering, slurp, AV, etc.

Or should I step up to whatever is next? (what's next? The Pentium D servers?)
 
I'd probably look at something a bit more powerful if the machine itself is going to do all that. AMD X2 would be a much better choice than Pentium D.
As long as you stay away from cheap NICs you should be fine, Broadcom, Intel etc shouldn't be any issues at all.
//Danne
 
I think I ran it with the RAID on a PE R300 (or was it R310?) for a while on beta 2.0... I know I used the beta and not the (at the time) 1.2.3 release due to NIC support. Have that server somewhere in the office & I can check the RAID support, but PERC 6 sounds right.

Oh I think the onboard NIC is broadcom, personally I'd go with the tried and tested Intels, you can get 4 port Intel 1000 preinstalled from Dell in 1 of the PCIE slots, other would be used for the RAID card.
 
I run PE1650/PE1750 with no issues, RAID 5 and RAID 1 work fine. 1650 has dual Intel GbE and 1750 has dual Broadcom Server GbE, both rock-solid.
 
Back
Top