Will this work?

[Complicated]

Hello,

I've used PFSense years ago but never OpnSense. I'd like build the box with a few functions, and before I start spending money and time, I want to find out if this will even work.

What I want to do is build an OpnSense box that will connect to my ISP, act as a VPN server so I can access my lan, and act as a VPN client so I can use a service for outbound traffic. If possible, I'd also like it to act as sort of a 10gb switch. How I wanted to accomplish that is by building the box with 3 2-port 10gb cards, and one gigabit port to connect to the ISP. I'd like the 6 10gb ports to act as a switch on the lan. One would go to a 48 port gigabit switch with an uplink, and the others would be for servers and maybe a desktop or two.

Would that be possible? The card I want to use for all 3  is an HP 516937-B21, which as far as I understand it will work with FreeBSD, but I can't be certain until I test it.

As for the rest of the hardware I'll probably start with an i3-4150, and 8gb of mem, with an SSD.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[bartjsmit]

The main issue is likely to be the L2 10Gbps performance. I doubt that you will be able to get sufficient bandwidth out of the PCI-e bus.

You may get better overall throughput by connecting your servers/desktops with 802.3ad LAG's if you have sufficient ports on the gigabit switch.

Bart...

[Complicated]

Thanks Bart!

Yeah I know it will be constrained, and I was exaggerating a bit. I really only want to do one, but was curious if it was possible in case I had to do it. The funny thing is they say the cards are 10gb, but a PCI-E 2.0 8x card, which it is, only does 4gb. So I don't even know where they get off calling it a 10gb card.

The switch I have is a Netgear with LAGG, but I have never been able to get it to work properly. I have a Quanta LB4M coming with 2 10gb for upling. 1 for the OpnSense box, and the other for an unRaid box. But I was hoping an extra port could be used to run a connection to a desktop that does video editing to speed up transfers to the NAS. Ideally I'll find a deal on a used 10GB switch and connect the Quanta to it.

[bartjsmit]

Don't get me started about kit with mismatched L1 and L2 speeds ;-) I'm looking at you, '600' Mbps powerline adapters with aspirational gigabit interfaces.

Merrily going off-topic here; which Netgear switch are you using?

My pre-loved GS724TS effortlessly bonds ports for Windows/Hyper-V 2012 R2, CentOS 7 and vSphere 6 dvSwitches and cost a relative pittance. Certainly likely to remain much cheaper than 10Gbps with SFP's, NIC's and fibre patch cables for a wee while yet.

One thing to look out for with web interfaces of vintage managed switches is the browser version. I am using an old (portable) Firefox version to configure the switch, precisely because newer browsers don't render the port selection fields properly.

Bart...