going through some of the old stuff that’s not being used I decided I was going to build a pfsense box, but I really don’t think I need the amount of power this server has for pf sense, 2x 6core xeons and 64gb of ram. I was wondering if I would be able to run debian on the same machine but for the life of me I couldn’t think of how to do this. little advice would be great.
thanks
you might consider a dell r210 v2… get a e3-1240 cpu at least… the e3-1220 does not support the aes-ni protocol, as i understand it… that’s the route i’m going for my new pfsense utm… router/firewall/filter… it’s a single core xeon, but does hyperthread btw… so its really 8 threads… mine will be coming with 4gb of ecc memory, but it can handle up to 32gb, i figure i need to get it to 16 to handle all the pfblocker/suricata/etc that i want to load it up with… it’s also a short box, to it’s rack size wide, 1u high and about 18-20 inches deep… just right for my wallmount rack.
Well, that to me screams virtualization. If you run a Type 1 hypervisor (like XCP-ng, Citrix XenServer, ESXi, etc.) on the bare metal server, you can have a virtual machine with your pfSense and have the remaining computing power left for other VMs. It’s what I do and it works very well.
the current pile is made out of r610s that i got from work a few years back as a dumpster find and after poking at it i was able to get the ram they had in them as well, so 2 of the systems are duel x5650 with 48gb, and the final is the same cpu but 128gb of ram. the wiki said they support aesni so i’m not to worried , was more curious about how to go about the virtualization. thank you
i will definitely take a look at a few different virtualization software for this because it would be nice to have all my random crap running on this one system vs having to plug in another server for stupid stuff.