Sophos

[zoomzoom]

The Silicom PEG6i is a popular six port NIC with the ESXi folks, and is based on the 82571EB which I *believe* works fine with FreeNAS.

I've come across quite a few threads and pages about Sophos 82xx problems, with recommendations to stick to the i series controllers

 

[pirateghost]

I know you mentioned you run yours out of a VM... is there any differences or reasons why a person chooses either or? If it's personal preference, I'm thinking I may just pay the extra $75 and upgrade to the octa core 2758 since it seems like a waste to run just UTM on a fairly decent server board ;)

I had my sophos running on a VM for a long time (years). This summer I bought a HP thin client to test running sophos on it. It was a success until I upgraded my internet service. The thin client couldn't handle 150mbps throughput so I moved it back to VM.

I like virtualization for just about everything so its just natural that I run my setup virtualized. Personal preference is all.

 

[jgreco]

I know you mentioned you run yours out of a VM... is there any differences or reasons why a person chooses either or? If it's personal preference, I'm thinking I may just pay the extra $75 and upgrade to the octa core 2758 since it seems like a waste to run just UTM on a fairly decent server board ;)

Me? Because we have a few hundred VM's in inventory and I like making smaller systems that do just one thing and dO It VERY WELL rather than making a big huge uber single system that does 100 different things that all break when I do an OS upgrade.

 

[zoomzoom]

If I go the VM route, what's a good option for the base OS? I've read to say away from Windows Server editions because they're resource hungry

 

[jgreco]

Free ESXi is still probably the best virtualization choice around.

 

[pirateghost]

If I go the VM route, what's a good option for the base OS? I've read to say away from Windows Server editions because they're resource hungry

Most people will suggest esxi as it is the standard virtualization platform(hypervisor), but I prefer proxmox since I don't want to manage my hypervisor from a windows client.

 

[zoomzoom]

Looks like I have some reading to do =]

 

[jgreco]

Most people will suggest esxi as it is the standard virtualization platform(hypervisor), but I prefer proxmox since I don't want to manage my hypervisor from a windows client.

Real men manage ESXi from the CLI. *cough*weenie*cough*

 

[pirateghost]

Real men manage ESXi from the CLI. *cough*weenie*cough*

I would be interested to know how you install a windows VM via the CLI... Sometimes I need to do that.

 

[Jailer]

The Silicom PEG6i is a popular six port NIC

This can't be right. A 6 port Intel based NIC this cheap?????

 

[zoomzoom]

This can't be right. A 6 port Intel based NIC this cheap?????

I'd hazard a guess all 6 ports share bandwidth, similar to the marketing of multi-port usb 3 hubs and controllers (that's the exact reason I went with the Vantec UGT-PCE430-4C, which has a dedicated chip for each port)... it's either that or it's a counterfeit scheme similar to the flash drive one where flash drives are advertised 64GB+ but have 8 or 16GB chips.

Silicom is also one of the counterfeiters listed on the link posted by @Ericloewe in his reply earlier

 

[jgreco]

Pretty sure we figured out Silicom was legit. Of course there could well be knockoffs, but using that logic, you need to avoid Intel too. As always I suggest due diligence.

 

[zoomzoom]

Pretty sure we figured out Silicom was legit. Of course there could well be knockoffs, but using that logic, you need to avoid Intel too. As always I suggest due diligence.

That's a very good point =]

 

[gpsguy]

Yes, I was in that boat.

I had a white box machine with 5 NIC's. Every so often, one of the Intel NIC's would stop passing traffic. After a restart, it would start to work again and then die again in a month or two. Last year, I had the small business buy a SG210. It's been rock solid.

I've come across quite a few threads and pages about Sophos 82xx problems, with recommendations to stick to the i series controllers

 

[jgreco]

Also, the 82571EB is an early gen PCIe 1.0a dual controller, so jamming three on a card isn't that hard to believe, and folks retiring decade-old 6 port cards in favor of 10GE or more modern cards is totally believable to me.

 

[Ericloewe]

I do wonder how they get three in one card. Do they natively support such scenarios or are they using a PCI-e switch?

Edit: The blurry picture on Amazon shows a large heatsink in a corner, suggesting a switch chip. It's odd, because those tend to cost nearly as much as the card's asking price, unless PCI-e 1.x switches are dirt cheap.

 

[jgreco]

I don't recall. It does require an X8 slot, so quite possibly it just uses two lanes per controller?

 

[jgreco]

http://www.servethehome.com/dell-silicom-peg6i-port-gigabit-gige-intel-82571eb-network-adapter/

 

[Ericloewe]

I don't recall. It does require an X8 slot, so quite possibly it just uses two lanes per controller?

The problem isn't bandwidth, it's the extra stuff (the small part of the connector).
Kinda like you can't just jam four 4x PCI-e SSDs in one 16x card - the host can only talk to a single device on a physical port. On the case of SSDs, besides the universal but expensive switch solution, Supermicro also has support for cheaper passive adapters on some motherboards - I assume they use non-standard PCI-e slots that can carry the extra stuff for a second SSD.

 

[jgreco]

Well, PCIe bifurcation can be used to separate up PCIe lanes, so I'm going to spitball here and suggest that yes you could jam four PCIe X4 onto an X16. I can definitely give you the part number of a card to split X16 into two X8 for the Supermicro C2750 board....