Friday, August 12, 2016

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. :-)