Traffic shaping with virtual pfsense and SLES 12 KVM Host

My traffic shaping has really worked out using pfsense to lower my buffer bloat and get better network performance.



I built my own pfsense from a Dell OptiPlex 990 SFF PC with an Intel Core i5-2400 3.1GHz. I have installed an Intel PRO/1000 VT Quad Port Server Adapter LP PCI-E for more networks and vlans on my network. Traffic shaping was a breeze with pfsense. I of course run pfsense virtualized as the OS itself doesn't work on the hardware physically. BSD seems to have a limited hardware support than Linux these days. It was really the fact that BSD kernel didn't have the right support for this chip and kept hard locking with a kernel error that made no sense. So I have installed SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP1 as the HOST OS which is humming along with no kernel errors and pfsense is running as a KVM virtual machine. I have bridged all the network interfaces for the virtual machine and it works great. Its been running for 3 months now with no troubles.

Now to try out Sophos UTM. Looks like a fun alternative to pfsense and its Linux based. :-)