On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 1:02 PM, Chris Bagnall <[email protected]>wrote:
> On 24/10/13 5:30 pm, Thinker Rix wrote: > >> >> 1. Would the Core2Duo CPU be sufficient for my requirements or should I >> > chose the 2,4 GHz Quad-core, the 2,89 GHz-Quad-core or maybe an even a >> more powerful CPU or totally different setup? >> > > When I was deploying a Quagga-based BGP setup in a datacentre a couple of > years ago, the general consensus was that cores are more important than raw > clock speed - so 4x2.4Ghz is better than 2x3.4Ghz - at least when using > multiple interfaces. This was, however, with Linux hosts. One of the nice > things about those Intel server cards is the ability to lock NIC affinity > to CPUs/cores, so you can effectively task a core to one or more NIC ports. > If it's true that the number of cores is so important, why not an AMD FX-series (Bulldozer or Piledriver) 8-core chip? The Bulldozer chips are particularly inexpensive right now (possibly even cheaper than a Core 2 Duo/Quad - unless you already happen to have one lying around), and this sounds like a case where they should be more than adequate for your needs. They include the AES instruction set "AES-NI", which might make a significant difference for your VPN traffic (depending on what encryption algorithm you choose and if the binaries were compiled with AES-NI support). This doesn't *exactly *help, but there's a thread from February 2012 on the FreeBSD forums showing that a quad-core Xeon will easily route 800 Mbps (100Mpps) with very low load averages. See http://forums.freebsd.org/showpost.php?s=5cf37ee89e50d395317ec0d0555378d5&p=167391&postcount=6 for details. Since you want to do VPN, you'll likely need a lot more power for the encryption stuff, but I would think that the processing power required for the routing itself should scale somewhat linearly. > Hopefully others will chime in as to whether the same is true with FreeBSD > - I seem to recall there were SMP/multi-core efficiency issues with earlier > FreeBSD versions - hopefully those have been ironed out by now. This may help, from the FreeBSD release notes: > Symmetric multi-processor (SMP) systems are generally supported by > FreeBSD, although in some cases, BIOS or motherboard bugs may generate some > problems. Perusal of the archives of the FreeBSD symmetric > multiprocessing mailing > list<http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-smp> may > yield some clues. > 4x on-board Realtek 8111C Gigabit NICs >> > > Personally I'd spec a board that has Intel or Broadcom NICs - the Realtek > ones are just rubbish by comparison. There are no shortage of boards with 2 > Intel NICs on them these days. look at some of the Intel-manufactured > boards rather than third parties - they nearly always have Intel NICs. A > few years back I used lots of DG965RY boards (Intel NIC, onboard video, so > ideal for server environments). I'm going to second this one - stay away from Realtek NICs for real work (though if you go with AMD as I mentioned above, you'll likely be Broadcom onboard, not Intel, and you will have a hard time finding AMD boards with more than two onboard NICs). I hope that helps (at least a little). Moshe -- Moshe Katz -- [email protected] -- +1(301)867-3732
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