On Apr 2, 2014, at 3:24 PM, Ryan Coleman <[email protected]> wrote:
> Wouldn’t a layer-3 switch be a good investment in this situation? Put the
> load on another device instead of, what is for all intents and (definitely)
> purpose a thin, light-weight piece of hardware?
It doesn’t even need to be a layer-3 switch.
A decent layer-2 switch with enough programmable control would do it.
Such switches (layer 2 and even layer 3) exist, and programmable control can be
had (sometimes) via protocols like OpenFlow.
The obvious path here is pfSense -> ofSense as a controller for OpenFlow
hardware. Not that this isn’t already being actively discussed inside Netgate
or anything… :-)
(here is a huge hint: http://store.netgate.com/Switches-C167.aspx)
This would enable multiples of 10G performance for load-balancing, packet
filtering, and even NAT (with the right switch hardware).
The only issue here is that such switches tend to be a bit … pricey. Thusfar,
the community hasn’t shown a lot of appetite for solutions that cost more than
a few hundred dollars.
Even Chris continually touts that an Alix board is “enough for most people”.
He’s right, except that the world of existing networking doesn’t allow a lot of
flexibility, and even home users
might find that the complexity of configuring NAT/VLANs/packet
filtering/caching/… is a bit much. I’m not saying that a home user needs a
$3,000 openflow switch, but a $300 solution with
3-4 Gb Ethernet ports should be more than adequate, since, in the right
scenarios, even a Gb/s Google Fiber feed could be handled by a 2-4 core SoC and
a set of re-architected software.
Jim
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